Quotes About Grief

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.

whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.

Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. —Anne Lamott

those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal

Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.

Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don't have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in—then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.

You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination. Every

The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to. Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.

Don't get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Years after her death, I started thinking mean things about myself, and that holding on to her shirt was pure neurotic clinging. That it was ridiculous. Part of me understood that my hold on it had to do with the excruciating mess and weirdness of my family: how only a handful of people in your lifetime help redeem this mess, so that when one of them dies, hope dies. You never fully recover. You can't.

I'd given talks for years about how when it comes to grieving, the culture lies--you really do not get over the biggest losses, you don't pass through grief in any organized way, and it takes years and infinitely more tears than people want to allot you. Yet the gift of grief is incalculable, in giving you back to yourself.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

Sometimes I can't look you in the eye; you're like a building that's burned out inside, with the outer wall still standing.

All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Grief strikes where love struck first.

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

Tragedy is the common lot of man. 'So many people have lost children' I remind myself. pp 178-179 This tragedy is such an inextricable part of my story that it cannot be left out of an honest record. Suffering - no matter how multiplied - is always individual. p 179

The capacity to love does not die when the lover dies.

How grief and the passage of years can leave their mark. How the burden of duty can wear away the body's resilience. - Pg. 242

I can't think of anything worse than for the person you love most in the world to take their own life, without warning you, and without explaining anything at all as to why

We will all miss him, even if we don't know it is his absence that is hurting us.

Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out--anger is momentarily easier to cope with.

It was embarrassing to be obliged to watch grief one cannot help.