Quotes About Grief

This sense of absence had been growing since Molly's funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.

She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow.

His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.

In death, they all looked the same. This morning they spoke, they breathed, they kissed their loved ones good-bye. And now they lay dead. Gone forever.

And just when I thought the pain had dulled, my mind would betray me and bring Dad back to life in my dreams. Sometimes I didn't realize that he was dead until I awoke and then it was like a punch in the stomach. And sometimes I knew in my dream that I was dreaming, and I woke up crying.

People around me died, usually in horrible and bloody ways.

It's almost as if the dead have no value unless we know that someone they are related to is still alive and mourning them.

My son Andrew was an extraordinary young man, loved and admired by all who knew him. His accidental death is a terrible tragedy.

But for me, it is when a student has died. I find the death of a young person the most difficult and painful of times. To explain it to other young people, to see a bright future snuffed out, is just awful. I am haunted by those deaths.

My father passed away when I was pretty young. I was 7 years old, and I think when that happens, there are a variety of ways that a young person can react to that loss. I think, for me, it kind of put me in a perpetual state of feeling like something is wrong with me and like I didn't belong, or everybody else had things that I didn't have.

I had one young man tell me he wished I was his mom. Another young woman told me that every time she watched 'The Office,' I reminded her of her mother, who had just passed away a year ago, and that every time she saw me she felt as if she had a piece of her mom still with her.

My brother Alan - who was seven years younger than me - died from leukemia when he was 52. He never knew a day's good health - I wish I could have given him some of my good health. But he was always so cheerful and sweet.

Atul had a child from his first marriage but lost him when he was just 16 years old. His wife died 7-8 years later. He's really had a tough life. Probably these experiences have made him a more sensitive, caring and loving person... Had we been 20 years younger, we definitely would have had children.

Generally, the younger the victim, the greater the grief. Yet even when the elderly or infirm have been afforded merciful relief, their loved ones are rarely ready to let go.

I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother.

I've know Justin since I was a child. I went to school with his younger brother Michel, who died in the Avalanche. But Justin and I are four years apart - when you're 12 and 16, it's worlds away. I always thought he was handsome though.

My sister Edith died at the age of 43. She was the youngest sister and the funniest. I had to harrumph and snort a few times to stop the weeping.

My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died.

When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?

If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.

It's not natural to outlive your child. This has always been my greatest fear.

There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.

If you live through the death of your child, you should be able to talk about it and let other people know it's OK to go on.

I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.