Meghan O'rourke said this quote

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

~ Meghan O'rourke

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

~ Meghan O'rourke

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

~ Meghan O'rourke

the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

~ Meghan O'rourke