Quotes About Lost Love

A fine last farewell

 , Is part love letter to her mother, part mapping of both the universal condition that is grief and its “exquisitely personal transactions” – what CS Lewis called “the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace” that is lost when a loved one dies.

Barbara and Paul O’Rourke were teachers and school administrators who had married when she was just 17 and he 23. Barbara was “tall, fizzy, athletic”, a practical woman who loved children and was possessed of a “calm vibrancy” and a “clear compass”. She and Paul had three children who enjoyed an apparently idyllic upbringing: “The days seemed created for our worship,” O’Rourke writes.

By the time she was in her 20s, Meghan O’Rourke was already highly accomplished. One of the youngest editors in the history of the New Yorker  , and the blend of the lyrical and the journalistic, the personal and the public, shapes this beautifully wrought memoir.

“For hours I lay on my couch,” O’Rourke writes, “reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside . . . the sky going grey, then eerie violet, the night breaking around us, snow like flakes of ash. A white mantle covered trees, cars, lintels, and windows. It was like one of grief’s moods: melancholic, estranged from the normal . . .”.

O’Rourke tracks her responses – and to a lesser extent, those of her father and brothers – to the loss, calling herself as “a lucky person whose life was . . . touched by the ineluctably real for the first time”.

The ineluctably real is the painful fact of impermanence, which she tries to battle first by marrying during her mother’s illness. “I had gotten married in some way to signal my faith in the future . . . Once it became clear that our marriage would not save [my mother], I found myself fleeing it.”

The marriage quickly fell apart and ended in divorce, though O’Rourke and James Surowiecki, a financial columnist at the the New Yorker  , have since reunited. She then left her job and began an affair with a man who lived across the country, believing that if she changed everything, she could change the inevitable, too.

The death of a loved one may, perhaps, be harder to bear for those who don’t believe in an afterlife: “a secular mind searching for its lost love” has little idea where to look and an underlying suspicion that any consolations are contrived.