Quotes About Mourning

Era una quietud que yo conocía bien: así se encerraba en sí misma una casa cuando alguien moría.

It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned—for it's a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances.

I hadn't been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong.

Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone died.

we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis's house, where one of Francis's aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. (Freud, 1961, p. 386)

While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil. -John Taylor

When I was first getting to know her we were in a viewing room at the funeral parlor looking at a new line of cigar-shaped caskets that were called "Time Capsules of the Future.

I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment, crying hard, searching for my wife's hair. For two months got them from the drain, from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came, there was no way to be sure which were hers, and I stopped. A year later, repotting Michiko's avocado, I find a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

she had placed her husband's cell phone, fully charged, inside the casket . . . and that she had called and left him messages for months after.

Death is ear-splitting, it's shattering with absence; over time, it's quieter.

dressed in mourning—in white—according to the custom in royal families in those days,

The first death changes everything, and all deaths afterward bring us back to the first death.

There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.

When someone you love that much leaves you behind there isn't as much of you left to die when your own time comes.

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

Te voici Sujette à la Mort Etale ton Bien sur le Sol Poches, lettres, photos, paroles, Te voici Sujet en ta Mort. Te voici Corps perdant tout Corps Perdant tes lèvres, tes paroles, Chevelure noire du sol Au bord d'une Mort sans rebord. Ici le présent retenu Que tu ne tiendras pas, que tu Laisses continuer sa cible. Là ma mémoire sans projet Sans impossibles, sans possibles, Dont ta Mort est l'autre Sujet.

Back at the house. How could you end a whole era and bury a century of life and be home before suppertime? Big Angel could not reconcile himself to this dirty deal they had all been dealt. Death. What a ridiculous practical joke. Every old person gets the punch line that the kids are too blind to see. All the striving, lusting, dreaming, suffering, working, hoping, yearning, mourning, suddenly revealed itself to be an accelerating countdown to nightfall.

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

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.

And yet, I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was, even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you'd planned.

Shostakovich later said, Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn't a single family who hadn't lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. This requiem allowed them to mourn together, in public.

It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.