Quotes About Mourning

Roman's wife Sharon Tate had been murdered by Charles Manson the year before, but Roman had been through so much leaving the Warsaw ghetto that he was very strong and private.

Probably between half a million and eight hundred thousand in all were killed in Punjab in 1947.

When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.

the phone rang. When the phone rang so early in the morning, it oftentimes meant somebody was dead. An elderly person had passed in the night. A Friday night traffic fatality. The families of deceased would set about the task of notifying family and friends, and somewhere among the sad litany of phone calls, they dialed our number.

There is no dignity for the dead. There are only ceremonies for the living

And no one was left to walk behind that coffin but three old women who quietly, timidly, beneath the black veils covering their transitory old faces, mourned the end of a lineage and the inevitability of extinction.

He saw that women, in gathering close to death, were in these times of mourning the producers of a most unique symphony, a collective weeping that had evolved into one of mankind's most sophisticated chants.

My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here!

Death is a kind of nakedness, a kind of indecency, a kind of faux pas. Unless we have known the dead person well enough to experience true loss, or unless we have wronged the dead person enough to experience guilt, the only emotion we can experience is embarrassment.

The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed. (I'll be waiting)

To say goodbye is to die a little" - The Long Goodbye

It wasn't surprising and it wasn't quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine's corpse was and urged me to see her at the funeral chapel. This with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we'd been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two

The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot.

If I Should Die Before You Do When you wake up from death, you will find yourself in my arms, and I will be kissing you, and I will be crying.

We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process ... the mere act of brushing some of them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system ... we make what Robert Bly calls a decent into ashes. We mourn the self we abandoned ... we find a certain amount of grief to be essential ... We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist.

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

Constance: Tell me, what happened to William's little maid? I never saw her again after that dinner. Mary Maceachran: Elsie? -- She's gone. Constance: Oh, it's a pity, really. I thought it was a good idea to have someone in the house who is actually sorry he's dead.

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work.

It was quiet; so quiet. Didn't these people know how to grieve for a good man? Didn't they know how to weep, and scream with rage, and curse the powers of darkness in their sorrow? Didn't they know how to hold one another, and dry one another's tears, and tell tales of the things he had done, and of what he had been, to see him safe on his way? Where were the great fires, and the toasts in strong ale, and the scent of burning juniper?

A lengthy and painful discussion followed. It lasted through tea and dinner. It was revealed to Lady Beatrice that, though she had been sincerely mourned when Mamma had been under the impression she was dead, her unexpected return to life was something more than inconvenient. Had she never considered the disgrace she would inflict upon her family by returning, after all that had happened to her? What were all Aunt Harriet's neighbors to think?

She had felt this intense disembodiment for the last four days, really from the moment the Snake Man had told them to turn around. And then the police, the undertaker, asking if she wanted to see the body one last time and Claire blanching at the word body and sobbing like a child because she had spent every single second since they had taken Paul from her arms trying to remove the image of her lifeless, murdered husband from her mind.