Quotes About Grief

This is not the kind of thing that happens, ever. Not even here. Do you know anyone else who's lost sixteen family members in one day?" Meredith glares at him, but he plows ahead. "We have to help them. If the suffering of our friends means

It's the bond of trauma, the bond of sharing an indescribable experience together. Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the characters they've met, the fear that travels with them, the grief and fatigue that eat at them. Their collective determination to keep pressing north.

If there could be anything worse than having a parent die, it would be having a parent who never bothered to meet you.

And then last autumn his heart had stopped working properly. The veterinarian said that they just had to care for him and love him, and Batty had loved him, and loved him, and loved him, but it hadn't been enough. No one in her family had ever said that Hound's dying was her fault, but she knew the truth. She hadn't been able to keep him with her, to stop him from leaving her behind.

It wasn't a rock. It was a dog's rubber bone, left behind months ago to be buried first under autumn leaves, then winter snow. Just an old rubber bone, but Batty was already braced for what she knew would come—the rushing in her ears, the stab in her stomach, and the seeping away of the colors from her world. The soft blue spring sky, the yellow forsythia hedge, even Ben's bright red hair—all dulled, all gray and wretched.

Is there anything more horrible than death?

Death can do that, make reality as hard to hold on to as water dripping through your fingers.

And I don't think anybody ever gets over loss. I think you get through it. You let it get through you.

You never know how the loss will come -- whether he will lose you or you him, but it is a certainty that there will be a shattering involuntary separation. Death is the abandonment caused not by betrayal but by fidelity.

I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. 'I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,' I told him ... 'because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.

When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

The young man had lost his mentor, his home, and his brother, all because of the actions of a single night.

When she lost him, she lost not only her only child but all those decades of sacrifice—she lost her identity and her hope.

Grandpa Zachary had died.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you. As

I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

But he drank a lot. When love dies, he told me, there are no survivors.

But he's here- right here, he challenged shrilly. Daddy, daddy, speak to me! It's David! Reaching out his hand, he gently touched his fathers face. He drew back then, at once, his eyes distended with terror. He isn't! He is- gone, he chattered frenziedly. This isn't the father-part that KNOWS. It's the other- that they leave. He's left it behind him- like the squirrel, and the water in the brook.

For a time neither the man nor the woman could speak. There was nothing in their humdrum, habit-smoothed tilling of the soil and washing of pots and pans to prepare them for a scene like this- a moonlight barn, a strange dead man, and that dead man;s son babbling of brooks and squirrels and playing jigs on a fiddle for a dirge. At last, however, Simeon found his voice.

Since the death of his daughter, a consumptive, he had not thrashed a woman; he lived alone.

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

On everyone's back, there was a sack. In everyone's eyes, tears and distress.