Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It’s like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

O’Rourke depicts grief as cyclical and ambushing rather than linear: a “bad moon” suggests phases and returns, while a “sleeper wave” evokes a sudden surge that can knock you down without warning. By likening grief to an “inner combatant” or “saboteur,” she emphasizes its involuntary, adversarial quality—how it can hijack attention and bodily response at trivial sensory cues (light shifts, a commercial jingle). The image of a “memory switch” captures grief’s mechanism: ordinary stimuli reactivate loss, collapsing past and present into an immediate, physical experience (tears). The passage underscores grief’s unpredictability and its intimate entanglement with everyday life.