Quotes About Grief

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through

He'd cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he'd refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

It was a circumambulation of such precise, ritualistic grief no one interfered.

For nearly two years, I'd worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find—my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn't shed.

It has been a day of suffering for you," he said, and the words opened a ravine of sadness in me. My eyes glazed, a sob creeping up the back of my throat.

He'd cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he'd refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her. Sometimes he couldn't fathom why he'd thrown in his lot with these aging men.

Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn't know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who'd once filled it up. I didn't stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.

I slept with grief and woke to it. It was always there, a black strap around my heart.

Now that she was gone, they loved her a lot better.

The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.

The day we gathered our daughter's bones, the valley was full of wild lilies. Do you remember? You told me to consider the lilies, that God takes care of them and will surely, then, care for us. Consider them now, my love. Consider the lilies.

The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too. One day had never come. I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.

I turned off the light and tried to sleep but ended up nursing a sense of loss that seemed heavier than ever.

I'd always taken my hope from mauma and she was gone.

This past year I grew up to know hunger, grief, darkness, fear. I began to understand how lonely you can feel even when all you want is to be alone.

Sometimes it's safer to cry about people you don't know than to think about people you really love.

The only feeling stronger than loss is love.

So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.

Go away, he said. Go away. I wish you had never come here. I wish I had never heard of the Light and the Dark, and your damned old Merriman and his rhymes. If I had your golden harp now I would throw it in the sea. I am not a part of your stupid quest anymore, I don't care what happens to it. And Cafall was never a part of it either, or a part of your pretty pattern. He was my dog, and I loved him more than anything in the world, and now he is dead. Go away .

People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion—not at the beginning—of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them. Too often, "forgive and forget" means "pretend it didn't happen.

It's extremely frustrating when you've worked hard to get to the point of confrontation, but one or both of your parents are dead.

The shock of a sudden death, Joan Didion attests, is "obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.

Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.

Bereavement, she had discovered, was about many things, but one of those, and the one which few people seemed to know or warn about, was a long-lasting, overwhelming physical and mental tiredness.