Quotes from David Kessler

Love and grief come as a package deal. If you love, you will one day know sorrow.

She realized that for the dying butterflies were a symbol of transformation, not of death, but of life continuing, no matter what. Although your relationship with your loved one will change after death, it will also continue, no matter what. The challenge will be to make it a meaningful one.

Your pain will not always be like this," I told her. "It will change." This is a message that the grieving need to hear, and in the moment of saying it, I often observe a shift. The person looks up at me and says, "It will?" And he or she suddenly becomes lighter.

I often wonder what kind of a man he would have become. But I think I got a glimpse of that.

life ends, but love is eternal.

People often think there is no way to heal from severe loss. I believe that is not true. You heal when you can remember those who have died with more love than pain, when you find a way to create meaning in your own life in a way that will honor theirs. It requires a decision and a desire to do this, but finding meaning is not extraordinary, it's ordinary. It happens all the time, all over the world.

Your life will never be the same, but happiness again is still possible. Never being happy again is a statement about the future. But no one can predict the future. All they can know for sure is that they are unhappy today. It helps to say, "I'm unhappy today," and leave it at that.

I don't want to have to tell them that my life lost all its meaning when they died. They loved me, and they wouldn't want that.

It shouldn't be too surprising that the person who is actually present as we cross the threshold of life and take our first breath once again appears at the threshold as we take our last breath.

Life gives us pain. Our job is to experience it when it gets handed to us. Avoidance of loss has a cost. Having our pain seen and seeing the pain in others is a wonderful medicine for both body and soul.

After all my years working with the dying and the grieving, I have found that in this lifetime, the ultimate meaning we find is in everyone we have loved. Your loved one's story is over. For unknown reasons, their time on earth has drawn to a close, but yours continues. I can only invite you to be curious about the rest of the story of your life.

I've worked in the medical field for years as a nurse. I try to know the ins and outs of the health-care system, but nothing challenges a person as much as when his or her own family members become ill.

grief is optional in this lifetime. Yes, it's true. You don't have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined. As Erich Fromm says, "To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability

the reality is posttraumatic growth happens more than posttraumatic stress.

Mother Teresa, and she once told me that "death is part of the achievement of life.

William James, who was a professor at Harvard from 1872 to 1907 as well as a lecturer at numerous universities, is often referred to as "the father of American psychology." Yet in his lifetime, he was ridiculed for forming The American Society for Psychical Research. Unfortunately, we have a long-standing practice of criticizing those who look outside the traditional medical box.

talk to other parents who are broken and bitter and feel robbed at the loss of a child. They want to know why I wasn't destroyed by Jim's death. I tell them that his life had meaning even though it was so short, and perhaps he wasn't meant to be here any longer. Being with him when he died was a gift, and I've learned to trust in God, his sovereignty, and his faithfulness. I

I could blame everyone else for not feeling the pain I felt, or I could feel my own grief without any expectations about how anyone else should feel. I could have gratitude for whatever kindness people extended to me, while recognizing that they could not be expected to share my feelings. This was my tragedy, not theirs. I thought of the Auden poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," about suffering "while someone else is eating or opening a window.

It may feel like all meaning left with the person you lost, but that is not true. You can continue to connect meaningfully with those who are still living, and you can form new connections, too. Those connections do not diminish your love for the person who died. They will only enhance it.

we have more than opiates for pain, and we have more than anti-anxiety medication to combat fear and distress. We have the "who" and "what" we see before we die, which is perhaps the greatest comfort to the dying.

Maybe your meaning will come by finding rituals that commemorate your loved one's life, or by offering some kind of contribution that will honor that person. Or the loss of your loved one may cause you to deepen your connection to those who are still with you, or to invite back into your life people from whom you've been estranged. Or it may give you a heightened sense of the beauty of the life we are all so privileged to have as long as we remain on this earth.

I know you're drowning. You'll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you'll hit bottom. Then you'll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?

Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die.

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