Quotes About Mourning

Dans tes jupons remplis de ton parfum Ensevelir ma tête endolorie, Et respirer, comme une fleur flétrie, Le doux relent de mon amour défunt.

The priest read his thing. I didn't listen. There was the coffin. What had been Betty was in there. It was very hot. The sun came down in one yellow sheet. A fly circled around. Halfway through the halfway funeral two guys in working clothes came carrying my wreath. The roses were dead, dead and dying in the heat, and they leaned the thing up against a nearby tree. Near the end of the service my wreath leaned forward and fell flat on its face. Nobody picked it up. Then it was over.

Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer's crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum's entire social world had vanished.

For a moment the man from London and the woman in mourning considered each other in silence, each gauging temperament from the slender evidence of appearance.

My dad's funeral was one of those instances when you're reminded of what it means to show up for people. The tradition

In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.

I am deeply saddened by the death of my dear friend, Dudley Moore.

His answer was to read to me—in a deep, richly cadenced voice that gave me my first glimmering that words could be as eloquent as music—but it was all poetry of loss and mourning: "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," A Shropshire Lad, and T. S. Eliot. One line from "East Coker" was especially worrisome:

Stop to mourn for every good man that's died for us and you'd never get from bed to the chamber-pot.

Firmly, Luke put the thought out of his mind. Mourning the loss of a friend and teacher was both fitting and honorable, but to dwell unnecessarily on that loss was to give the past too much power over the present. The

She felt like a black candle at a wake for a snake.

his senses blunted by a permanent awareness of loss

Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass. Neither one had spoken a word.

He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl - the one who lived in his head - that I mourned when he died. Even more than I mourned him, I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was.

Jenny dies in my arms. Goes to sleep, doesn't wake up. My tears taste of blood.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented, rush in?

Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it.

How I wish I could leave or forget all my dead.

Every pore mourns. Not the brain, nor the chest where bereavement nests, but the body, whole-- how it burns. The ache of new bone being grown.

There were others of course - The Velvet Undergound, the Doors- who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway?

But what was faith if not a belief that God would do what He promised? She scanned the words again: "Beauty for ashes . . . Joy for mourning . . . Praise for the spirit of heaviness . . ." She underlined the final words with a trembling finger: "That he might be glorified.

It seems like our town has closed down these days leading up to the funeral. Old people still sit on their porches and talk, but their conversations aren't sprinkled with laughter anymore. Since the new, little kids haven't played outside, as if their moms are afraid someone might snatch them out of their yards and send them off to war.

We share in grief and ritualize letting go and moving on, but at heart, all true grief is private. There