Quotes About Grief

K H A D I J A S A Y S . . . In Kashmir when we wake up and say 'Good Morning' what we really mean is 'Good Mourning'.

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.

But around her, the air was sad, somehow. And behind the smile in her eyes, the Grief was a fresh, shining blue. Because of a calamitous car crash. Because of a Joe-shaped hole in the universe.

She described how, when her brother's body was found in a field and brought home, his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.

In Kashmir when we wake up and say "Good Morning" what we really mean is "Good Mourning.

Who was he mourning? She didn't know. A whole generation maybe.

In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir's grief and loss.

She was buried right next to her mother, Begum Arifa Yeswi. Mother and daughter died by the same bullet. It entered Miss Jebeen's head through her left temple and came to rest in her mother's heart. In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.

Something about Tilo's new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa – perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.

He left behind a Hole in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar. Through which their mother followed without even turning to wave good-bye. She left them behind, spinning in the dark, with no moorings, in a place with no foundation.

tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people.

If anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers.

Sometimes there is no comfort, only the knowledge that the worst has happened.

Endings matter, not just for the person but, perhaps even more, for the ones left behind.

But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain.

When I saw him three months later, he was still despondent. "I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered," he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes were rimmed red. He had one great solace, however: that she hadn't suffered, that she'd got to spend her last few weeks in peace at home in the warmth of their long love, instead of up on a nursing floor, a lost and disoriented patient. *

When I saw him three months later [after the death of his wife], he was still despondent. 'I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered,' he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes rimmed red.

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

Emily, who loved her best friend so much she still cannot listen to the records they once enjoyed together, and it is five years already since her friend died.

Our dead line our dreams, their deaths becoming more and more commonplace.