Quotes About Grief

Don't let anyone make you feel guilty because you are still grieving. Grief is a slow process and often takes as long as two years to complete its healing work. That doesn't mean that you will always hurt this badly, but it does mean that you should give yourself permission to take as much time as you need to work through your loss.

Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life.

Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size. MARK TWAIN

Acknowledge to yourself that the current criticism is triggering grief over a long-standing wound.

A drought is a tearless time of grief.

We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process ... the mere act of brushing some of them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system ... we make what Robert Bly calls a decent into ashes. We mourn the self we abandoned ... we find a certain amount of grief to be essential ... We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.

Every love story is a potential grief story.

We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still—at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky)—it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? because love is the meeting point of truth and magic.

Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere -- or nowhere -- an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again.

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.