Quotes About Grief

It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn't count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn't anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open empty space.

How was it, Cory kept thinking, that when a person died they were no longer anywhere? You could search the entire world and never find them. It was one thing for a body to stop working and be carted away under a sheet; it was another thing for the sense of that person to evaporate. The textural and indisputable sense, as strong but as hard to pinpoint as a gas.

If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you'd meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be illegal for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child, your boy, then yes, he should draw and draw.

Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.

People rarely spoke of a breakup as tragic; instead, breakups were part of life. But when you and the other person broke up, you could look for them everywhere, and maybe you would physically find them, but even if they were the same person, they were not for you; they were not yours. The evaporation of love was like a kind of death.

But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies.

And the family that seemed so perfect began to suffer through small and then large tragedies—a wayward sister gone more wayward, the parents' separation and then divorce, and, most terrible of all, the death of Meg's older brother in a boating accident. There's something so intense about these relationships we have with other families during our formative years, and that's one of the main things I wanted to explore in The End of Everything.

When your mom is gone, the thing no one ever tells you is that the little compass needle inside keeps spinning around and around, never finingt North.

When your mom is gone, the thing no one ever tells you is that the little compass needle inside keeps spinning around and around, never finding North.

All these years later, the story of their parents' end, passed down like lore, still seemed unbearably romantic to their students—less so to Marie, who, after sobbing violently next to her sister, Dara, through the funeral, insisted, I never saw them hold hands once.

Good things, by their nature, are fleeting. It's those that bring us grief that linger.

Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy.

I closed my eyes against the sudden sorrow that someone I knew so well should be someone who consistently brought me so much grief.

Love, when it goes, can sometimes burn to ash. And sometimes it can leave nothing.

I didn't emerge from the cocoon of my past to become an uninhibited, emotionally healthy butterfly. Nothing is ever that easy. Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?

There had been times when missing him had felt like someone had reached inside her and pulled out the part of her that remembered how to breathe. And times when she'd barely given the memories of him a second's worth of her time.

Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?

This was where Caitlin had been killed.

All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words.

A grieving son was given the opportunity to write parting words on a card at his mother's funeral. He quoted the verse, "And morning came and Jesus was standing on the shore.

But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.