Quotes About Grief

I came from a hard, working-class world which, since my mother's death, had been dominated by men. I hadn't been encouraged to talk about the burden of grief, and because I was severely underdeveloped when it came to sharing my emotions, I mustn't have been the most communicative husband.

There's no road map. There's no textbook on how grief works and when your heart will be open - or if it ever will.

No one saw me cry over my dad's death for almost nine years. I hid what I felt, bottling up my emotions so tightly that almost nothing leaked out.

Even more than getting married or having kids, I found losing a parent is what thrusts you into adulthood. For me it was. That was when the Earth tilted on its axis, and there was a paradigm shift, and I felt like a different person.

I'm always happy when people choose to get another dog because it's a healthy and healing thing to do, and there are millions of them needing homes. But there is no single time frame to do it in because grieving is an intensely personal experience.

If you have a bereavement in your family, it's a terrible, terrible thing. But, you know, time passes. It's part of the cycle. It doesn't hurt so much.

How can our hearts not break? How can we hold our tears? How can we bear the pain of losing those loving children and their guardians, who were slain in Newtown, Conn.? Why can't we face the reality of our times and restrict deranged people from having these destructive powers?

Grief is a room without doors - but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

I can usually tell when a woman is going through a divorce because they look so gaunt and tired and sad. It's just a huge sadness. It's horrible. It's like death. You mourn, but the person's still there.

Growing up, I saw my mother cry exactly once. The morning of her brother's funeral. One long tear ran down her cheek through her make up until she caught it near her mouth and patted it dry with a tissue she pulled from inside her sleeve.

When my mother died, and when my father died, it's big. Our parents are giants; they're titans of our lives, so of course it's going to be a big deal.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

If you're going to love animals and have a life with them, the odds are you're going to lose them. It's helpful when you get a dog to accept the fact that this dog is not going to be with you your whole life.

I was six months pregnant when my brother died and my daughter was four-months-old when my mother expired. Gradually, I developed an inner resilience as today I believe there is a rainbow at the end of each storm.

No matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay. And you wave them off. You lie.

All love stories beget ghost stories.

Time and quiet, everyone counseled, would help. Best not to mention it. Best not to dwell on it, his mother had said. It was a terrible accident. It must have been hot. Windows were open at the time. And time would heal. Somethings were better left unsaid.

That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

Some people, they can't just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just...something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time.

Missing rubs the soul raw.

But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.

And the air was rent with cries of the living glaring at the rotted bones and rags of their kin and friends just a-swingin in the winds circling about the land, and pulling the bones and rags--some crumbling and dry, some still squirming with the worms eating away at them--from those once mighty roots, and putting them back in the gaping holes.