Quotes About Grief

It was a grief about which you could not, must not, dare not speak.

When you were still here, Isobe thought, death seemed so far removed from me. It was as though you stood with both arms outstretched, keeping death from me. But now that you're gone, suddenly it seems right here in front of me.

In mourning, I realized the most painful place on earth was sometimes the church you attended with the person you loved, the person now gone.

But she was looking into the past, trying to understand when it was that all the laughter died.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

If one of us should die, then I shall move to Paris.

Niemals sind wir ungeschützter gegen das Leiden, als wenn wir Lieben. Niemals hilfloser unglücklich, als wenn wir das geliebte Objekt oder seine Liebe verloren haben.

I don't want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It's a cliche, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial - people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who were very good with words - the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

How good is his memory? If very good, as dogs' memories are said to be, what grief being locked up alone might bring him. And - heart-shredding thought - is it still for you that he waits by the door?)

It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don't want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.

A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book. You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg. Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it.

I told the shrink: It would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore. You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief, either.

To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently (he says everything gently), Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting to be with other people. Hating to be with other people, I don't say. Terrified of being with other people.

Since I first heard about your death, haven't I often felt like someone living with one foot in madness. Early on, there were times when I would find myself somewhere without remembering how I got there, when I'd leave home on some errand only to forget what it was.

Dogs are the best mourners in the world, as everyone knows. Joy Williams.)

The exhaustion of mourning was my thought.

What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.

If I bring him home though, I swear he'll spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. And he deserves better than that, don't you think?' Yes, I think, my heart breaking. You can't explain death. And love deserves better than that.

Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting to be with other people.

And just because there are other people who've lost someone to suicide doesn't mean that what I'm feeling is something that can be shared.

One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.

I still think about him all the time. I just sobbed for an age when I found the note I wrote about his death buried in my computer.

She was adamant, and she was right, that all we can do is try to carry on. To accept. To incorporate death, grief and memory into our lives. People we love never leave us. They should never leave us.