Quotes About Grief

Now I know that, when you lose a child, it's not the same as losing a contemporary, even a beloved husband or wife. When you lose a child, you grieve as a child grieves, which is to say, you grieve backward. You don't get better as time passes, you get worse. Time does not take you closer to acceptance, only further from the one you love.

And it was that, the beyond-grief, the sealing-up of a mind still expected to produce order and plans, which she dreaded.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that knowing how you should be reacting to a loss has anything to do with how you react when it's your loss.

Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.

Y se marcho Bajo la lluvia Sin decir palabra Sin mirarme Y me cubri La cara con las manos Y llore

The interlocking of their fingers was the only scrap of comfort left to them.

I had never imagined my father dying. I had never inagined my parents dying. When I told Mariah this, she said that no one ever thinks their parents will die, ever, and I had to suppress the annoyance I felt at her for once again telling me about everybody when I told her something about myself.

He felt that he was lying, and in some way being disloyal as well, but he said only, "He was instantly killed. He didn't have to feel any pain.

When grief and shock surpass endurance there occur phases of exhaustion, of anesthesia in which relatively little is left and one has the illusion of recognizing, and understanding, a good deal.

Big Angel was late to his own mother's funeral.

Big Angel was aware of the sad steps of the dance. It cost him great effort to speak now. When you died, you died in small doses. You had trouble speaking. You forgot who was beside you. You were suddenly furious and in a panic of outrage. You wished you could be saintly. You wished you weren't so weak. You suddenly felt better and fooled yourself into believing that a miracle was about to happen. Well, wasn't that all a dirty rotten thing to pull on somebody.

You're going to live your life. You're going to honor him doing things you would have done if he'd never gotten sick and died

It was easier to talk about nothing than something. Because something was too terrible to discuss. Too dark and terrible to even think about.

Lost. The therapist made it sound as if the person could be found. As if death wasn't final and irrevocable.

Her mom's voice trembled as she read aloud: "We lost our beloved Sandy yesterday, 10 A.M. Stop. She died peacefully — no pain. Stop. We're flying her home to West Virginia for burial. Stop. Package for Dawn to follow. Stop. The Chandlers.

The Dog Hair The dog is gone. We miss him. When the doorbell rings, no one barks. When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us. We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes. We pick them up. We should throw them away. But they are all we have left of him. We don't throw them away. We have a wild hope—if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.

First they burned her - that was last month. Actually just two weeks ago. Now they're starvng him. When he's dead, they'll burn him too. Oh, how jolly. All this burning of family members in the summertime.

Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.

She is bending over her child. She can't leave her. The child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, "I'm going to get the camera," as if saying to the child, "Don't move.

That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you've been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we've explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we're having now that a few months have gone by--- but now it's time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

She begins to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal--we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.

One thing I have learned during these past few terrible years is that our grief and sorrow should be shared, not carried alone.