Quotes About Grief

Bobby's death was like if you'd spent nearly twenty years reading a book and were only halfway through when the book got lost or taken away from you. For the rest of your life, all you could do was guess the end.

No wonder Mama went away in her head when Clover passed on. And then Papa. I am going to visit my Mama tomorrow and tell her I am sorry for everything I ever did that caused her sorrow or worry, and for ever wishing, during those days, that she would come back. She probably wanted to stay there. It's a wonder she came back at all. If I knew how to make myself go away in my head, I declare I would.

One thing I'd learned from all the burying I'd attended was that sometimes it's hard to pay attention. Burying someone you know will set your mind down some distant trail, as the one you're really on is too painful to view. at the burial of Ernest, Sarah's brother p177

But there is no easy way to mourn a child.

A week later, I walked to Gwyneth's house. She and Dorothy and I shared tea and we wept for Jacob. We talked. We smiled a little. Then I left and waited for Cullah, and thought what a great emptiness was left by Jacob's passing. At last, I sat at the front door, on the chair where Patience had died. I held my hands folded at my heart, and ached for all who had passed from my world

Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember.

assassinated just four days before. "It was like

After I lost my fiance, it seemed like it would be better to always be alone than to risk being hurt again.

But here's what grieving people wish others would understand: grief is incredibly, relentlessly lonely. It really makes a huge difference to be reminded that we are not forgotten, that our loss is on the radar of people around us.

neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That's a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief.

In order to grieve—I needed to "unlearn" the way I learned to ignore my agony.

In the limousine on the way to my father's graveside services, I started to cry. My mother slapped me and told me to stop crying. I lacked a model to show me how to feel compassion for my pain.

With his passing, it seemed the sun stopped shining on our family.

Memories flooded back for me as I mourned increasing losses.

In The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale wrote of the murder of a boy Eldon's age, "Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional—to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away.

Contradictory emotions roiled over her; grief over Arnold's thwarted plans and their mutual hopes for a large reward; relief that her husband was safe, coupled with doubts abut their marriage. Would she ever see Arnold again?

Determination, the benign cousin of defiance, drove Lucy to continue enlarging her family to compensate for her lost children.

Sorrow will turn to stone unless you weep. I thought it would come before this. Weep it out.

There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.

I was four years old when my mother died. It's young enough that I might never think of her. Old enough that the knowledge would always be with me. And I don't. And it is.

The Noble Truth of Suffering, dukkha is this: 'Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering--in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.' Samyutta Nikaya 56.11.

The only cure for grief, someone had once told her, was love.

Death is part of life.