Quotes About Grief

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child's pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

She glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.

She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn't I save him, why didn't I realise that it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant - the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away.

The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bears great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Anges will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.

Do you still think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.

He thinks of his grief over his sister as an entity that is horribly and painfully attached to him, the way a jellyfish might adhere to your skin or a goitre or an abscess. He pictures it as viscid, amorphous, spiked, hideous to behold. He finds it unbelievable that no one else can see it. Don't mind that, he would say, it's just my grief. Please ignore it and carry on with what you were saying.

prepare her for the next world. They wept as they did so, not because

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else? I never knew it was possible to think about someone all of the time, for someone to be always doing acrobatic leaps across your thoughts. Everything else was an unwelcome distraction from what I wanted to think about.

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

She moves her comb, her shift, her gown next door. She takes up the bed that was once her aunts'. Nothing is said. She leaves her mother and sister to their grief and moves in above the workshop.

Descubre que es posible llorar todo el día y toda la noche. Que hay muchas formas de llorar: lágrimas que se derraman de repente, gemidos hondos y desgarrados, el interminable goteo silencioso de agua de los ojos.

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as "slipping away" or "peaceful" has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle.

Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.

Judith is whimpering, Susanna clutching her hand, so Agnes misses the moment, she misses seeing her son, the shroud see sewed for him, disappearing from view, entering the dark black river-sodden earth. It was there one moment, then she dipped her head to look at Judith and then it was gone. Never to be seen again.

To walk by his grave every Sunday is both a pain and a pleasure. She wants to lie there so that her body covers it. She wants to dig down with her bare hands. She wants to strike it with a tree branch. She wants to build a structure over it, to shield it from the wind and the rain. Perhaps she would come to live in it, there, with him.

Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives . . . The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.

You said.' Esme shuts her eyes, screws them up tight, bowing her head. 'You promised,' she says, almost inaudibly and, with her hands, she is crushing the material of her dress.

Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.

Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone.

Do not cry for me, Raven. Dying is part of living, a birth into a new life. You know this.