Quotes About Grief

The tears I feel today I'll wait to shed tomorrow. Though I'll not sleep this night Nor find surcease from sorrow. My eyes must keep their sight: I dare not be tear-blinded. I must be free to talk Not choked with grief, clear-minded. My mouth cannot betray The anguish that I know. Yes, I'll keep my tears til later: But my grief will never go.

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love." from "Memoriam

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and be there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

Someone is dead.  Even the trees know it

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burdens, his own way.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

It's like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I'm not sure that will ever change.

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.

This was not [him]. It was a thing, with all the [him]-ness gone from it. Death takes the person and leaves his shell behind, like a hollowed-out tree.

She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.

She refused to consider what losing him forever might do to her.

I write in lieu of love, to fill that empty space above death.

Marie-Claude m'a appelée. Jean-Yves est mort vendredi dernier. Il m'arrive de penser que nous sommes mystérieusement liés aux êtres et que leur disparition produit des « ondes ». Vendredi, ce jour où j'ai été si mal, où tout a paru me manquer, a été le jour de la mort de J.-Yves. Je ne l'ai jamais revu depuis juillet 63. Il m'avait confié : « Je n'ai pas d'ami. »

Ces souvenirs-là sont terribles chaque fois que je pense : il ne viendra plus, il ne dira plus ces mots-là, d'une manière brève, russe.

Larmes, silence et dignité, tel est le comportement qu'on doit avoir à la mort d'un proche, dans une vision distinguée du monde.

Il y avait un trou dans l'oreiller sur lequel sa tête avait reposé depuis dimanche. Tant que le corps était là, nous n'avions pas fait le ménage de la chambre. Les vêtements de mon père étaient encore sur la chaise. De la poche à fermeture éclair de la salopette, j'ai retiré une liasse de billets, la recette du mercredi précédent. J'ai jeté les médicaments et porté les vêtements au sale.

Mon mari est arrivé le soir, bronzé, gêné par un deuil qui n'était pas le sien. Plus que jamais, il a paru déplacé ici. On a dormi dans le seul lit à deux places, celui où mon père était mort.

Je le revis comme je le vivrai en souvenir. Je pleure en écrivant cela, torturée par la peur qu'il soit déjà parti.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

Hope is grief's best music.