Quotes About Grief

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?

I cried with Daddy in the kitchen when we found out, bright fluorescent white strip bulb, blackness outside, snow, crown die-back, tiny ivory Inuit duck for using in a board game, Monopoly, two big wide Inuit snow shoes in a museum, the fact that I don't know how the Inuits ever walked in those things.

I just hope Stacy knows I understand it's rough for her, the fact that it's tragic actually, the fact that it's just awful to lose your dad and never know where the heck he is, or why he disappeared, the fact that it's like she's just stuck in limbo, sitting duck, waiting for Frank's next move, his next urge to get in touch.

We can develop habits that help us feel gratitude, contentment, and joy, without diminishing how desperately we miss our loved one.

GRIEF IS A BY-PRODUCT of love. Because we loved, so must we grieve when the person we love is no longer physically with us. But the fact that they've gone doesn't mean that we must stop loving them, or thinking about them. Coming to terms with this fact, understanding that your love for that person never dies, is a major advance in our understanding of grief.

Throwing yourselves into recovery doesn't mean hiding from grief, pain, misery, aching. It just means you go with the present experience—when these emotions come, you open up to them and let them in—but you choose to get up in the morning and get out in the knowledge that, if you want to win this fight for survival, you've got to step up and take control.

some people very quickly develop a hunger for tools to help them cope with grief, and that there is nothing wrong with the desire for action—for what might be called proactive participation in the grieving process.

it will always be different, with your loss part of your new world and personal identity. But that doesn't mean you won't function effectively and meaningfully again, or fully embrace a life full of love and laughter, alongside plentiful memories of those who once stood beside you.

With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possibly be on this side of the grave.

They either beheld their children sink one after the other into the grave, or their youthful forms, withered by the unholy, vampire embrace of Brunhilda, assume the decrepitude of sudden age.

The thing about death is that we're all terrified of it happening, and we're devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.

If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of. If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of its own, can you still call yourself a mother?

I do not have the money anymore. It was all yours, after all. I slipped the check into the silk lining of the coffin when I kissed you good-bye for the last time.

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

All of us are grieving something. But while we are, we're putting one foot in front of the other. We're waking up to see another day. We're pushing through uncertainty, even if we can't yet see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are battered and broken, but we're all small miracles.

As she gets sicker, she fades a little more, until I am afraid one day I will wake up and not be able to see her at all.

You know, Michael, I used to sit around looking for a way to make sense of what happened, like there was some kind of answer I could find if I just looked hard enough. Then one day I realized that if there had been one, Dave would still be here. And I wondered if this...this feeling that I couldn't figure it all out...was what Dave had been feeling, too.

Where there is support, there is no grief.

It's amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It's standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It's the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love. But just because you can't see it anymore doesn't make it any less real.

There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

Jenna lost her mother. I lost my credibility. Virgil lost his faith. We've all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole.

let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.

It's the Lord's will," she said quietly. "You get through it. You just never get over it.