Quotes About Grief

Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart.

Yes. He knows I'm dying, but he can't really accept it and he'll be all alone when I'm gone. Can't you help him?

Great griefs are mute.

I've learned that you don't stop loving someone just because they die. And you don't stop loving someone who's dead just because you start loving someone else. I know this violates the natural law that two things can't occupy the same place at the same time, but that's never been true of the human heart anyway.

nobody was ever replaced in life, no hole completely filled or loss totally healed. You didn't need a medical degree to know that the human body really wasn't stronger in the broken places. Like any bone, the cracks would always show if you looked hard enough.

That's grief, man. It gets in you. Your body carries it. It's embedded.

We never lose the people we love.

Tears came to my eyes and grief ambushed me, as if it had been lying in wait all along.

Grief is a conduit -- for love, for compassion, for healing, and for grace.

Jake thanked God he had a son to put to bed when he knew somewhere there was a family, right now, waiting for someone who would never come home.

You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.

I had to hold on to my anger and my bitterness as a way of honoring those I'd lost.

In my life, no three miles have been flat and no three days have had sun. I've been brave in the past, but now I'm beyond devastated. My grief is like dense clouds that cannot be dispersed. I can't think beyond the blackness of my clothes and heart.

When they die, they keep loving. If love ends when a person dies, that is not real love.

Could love be strong enough to outlast death not once but three times?

grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.

Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home.

Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It's like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event.

Sarah's death and how it haunted you, how you were swallowed by your guilt. But your mother was at least partially responsible for how you handled that situation as well. Let's not forget that you were just a kid. With the right guidance, you might have come through that incident better." Jones

Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope.

When my father died, I waited for a haunting. I prayed for one. But he never came; I think he would have if he could.

counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

feel like when my mother died, she took with her the Mia I saw when she looked at me. I could never find that girl in my own reflection. To Mom, I was special—bright, powerful, beautiful—her angel. To the rest of the world, I was just a girl. Small for my age, shy, passingly pretty, smart enough. Just Mia.