Quotes About Grief

And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones.

But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

His glasses, carefully folded, placed in my mum's outstretched hand. His coat. An envelope. His watch. His shoes. And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there,

And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,' he wrote in his diary. 'The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.' His

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk.

The archeology of grief is not ordered.

I remembered the man I'd fallen for after my father died. I'd hardly known him, but it didn't matter. I'd recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed.

So I leaned over the bed and spoke to my father who was not there. I addressed him seriously and carefully. I told him that I loved him and missed him and would miss him always. And I talked on, explaining things to him, things I cannot now remember but which at the time were of clear and burning importance. Then there was silence. And I waited. I did not know why. Until I realised it was in hope that an answer might come. And then I knew it was over.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.

I read that after denial comes grief. Or anger. Or guilt.

That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I'd taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn't want to ever return.

Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father's legs gone, the woman's torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows.

I miss her. So much that sometimes I'm scared I'll bring her back.

She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable.

Jennifer Silver lived quite long. She didn't die until 1994. A reason why Lily never felt motherless was that her mother was there with her, a door and a curtain away.

They started bringing our babies out in those sheets and they laid them by my feet. They started making a line of them.

Disappointment is in fact a kind of grief—a reaction to the loss of something you desired. If you honor and gently hold the disappointment inside you, and at the same time keep yourself open to the wanting behind the disappointment, you'll be able to weather your disappointments and keep going. Another

Quando si viene a sapere, o la si vede di persona, della morte di uno di quelli che facevano la guerra accanto a te e che vivevano esattamente alla tua stessa maniera, prima ancora di capire provi un colpo al cuore. È come se d'un tratto venissi a sapere che tu stesso sei stato annientato. Il dolore arriva solo dopo un po'.

Tu pleures, tant ta peine est grande, Dans un désert, sans rien savoir… Et moi, debout auprès du soir, Je suis triste comme une offrande

My soft voice and demeanor were useless. In a pint jar, I carried a cremated friend, like flesh scraped from a cistern.

A missing lover, a severed hand, but a body never discovered… An heiress and a bloodied gown…

Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed,Never to be disquieted!My last good-night! Thou wilt not wake,Till I thy fate shall overtake;Till age, or grief, or sickness, mustMarry my body to that dustIt so much loves, and fill the roomMy heart keeps empty in thy tomb.Stay for me there; I will not failTo meet thee in that hollow vale.