Quotes About Grief

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be only human, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.

We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.

I'm not saying we shouldn't grieve. Just, why don't we put it in God's hands? she said. Why haven't we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We're supposed to believe in God but then why don't we obey the laws of God's universe, which teach us how small we are and where we're all going to end up?

it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

Queremos que el Padre Muerto esté muerto. Nos sentamos con los ojos llenos de lágrimas y deseamos que el Padre Muerto esté muerto… y entretanto hacemos cosas asombrosas con las manos.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

When a long-desired baby is born, what joy! More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth. But should the same infant die, would you measure the horror on the same rule? Grief weighs down the seesaw, joy cannot budget it.

When he was almost two, his father was killed in battle during the Seven Years War, the world's first global combat.

Music hadn`t always deepened my grief. For most of my sixteen years, it had healed my hurts, soothed them, given me a way to remember and the strength to move on.

This is what I imagined as I watched my kite, my beautiful kite, with its heart, its star and crayon, its note and flowers glowing from the light of the sun behind it. I felt love and grief and joy and all the emotions in between, letting my weathered broken heart knit itself back together again as I said goodbye to my mother. Our imaginations are such gifts, she used to say. So I thanked her for mine.

El padre de Jordana falleció el año pasado. Recuerdo cuándo sucedió, cómo se le notaba en los ojos después esa muerte, como un alfiler clavado en el centro de su ser. Duelo, pérdida, dolor, resistencia ante todo ello. Me obligo a mirarla de nuevo. Ahí está, la veo. La tristeza. Un añadido permanente, incluso cuando Jordana está en frascada en otras cosas, como nuestra clase. ¿También yo la tengo en la cara?

Your mother, was she clear in her mind until the end?' he asked, knowing it was invasive and cruel to do so. Because his mother had died years before her body did, Brunetti was unable to judge which sort of death was worse and for whom. In all these years, although he had asked many people who had lost a parent, he had never had an answer that would decide the case for him.

a great comfort faith can be to those left behind.

Brunetti asked, surprised how painful he still found the thought of his mother. He had tried for the last year, with singular lack of success, to tell himself that his mother, that bright-spirited woman who had raised them and loved them with unqualified devotion, had moved off to some other place, where she waited, still quickwitted and eager to smile, for that befuddled shell that was her body to come and join her so that they could drift off together to a final peace. 'I

but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.

Again, she put her face in her hands and wiped away the years, then let them return and looked at him.

Why was it that the words with which we confronted death always sounded so inadequate, so blatantly false?

I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

I'd unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.