Quotes About Loss

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time. Yet

and sister and father and mother had. I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don't think I'll ever get over Melanie's death in Gone With the Wind. But I'm still so glad I got to know her.

We can't do much for the people we've lost, but we can remember them and we can read for them: the books they loved, and books we think they might have chosen. Maybe the reading can help us answer the questions they would have asked us if they were still here to ask them. Maybe the reading can help us figure out how to honor their lives and continue their legacies.

I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom's dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

Return enraptur'd Hours, When Delia's heart was mine; When she, with wreaths of flowers, My Temples wou'd entwine. When Jealousy nor care Corroded in my Breast, But Visions, light as Air, Presided o'er my Rest— Now Nightly round my Bed No airy Visions play; No Flowers crown my Head Each Vernal Holyday? For far from those sad Plains My Lovely Delia flies, And rack'd with Jealous Pains, Her wretched Lover dies.34

Hoeveel minder begerenswaardig zou Madelon misschien zijn als ik haar niet aan iemand ontstelen moest!

No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone, Corpse-gazing, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness; Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness, Yours still, you mine; remember all the best Of our past moments, and forget the rest.

Scarcely a tear to shed; Hardly a word to say; The end of a Summer's day; Sweet Love is dead.

my ianfu sisters who had died in the comfort station.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.

everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurrence.

When my mother died I was very young,And my father sold me while yet my tongueCould scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;Then stretches out my golden wing,And mocks my loss of liberty.

I experienced a form of grief so intense and pure I thought it would kill me.

This same kind of overreaction occurs when an ending is viewed as symbolic of some larger loss. The minor layoff in a company that has never had layoffs before is an example. It isn't the loss of the particular individuals—it's the loss of the safety people felt from the no-layoff policy.

Learn to look for the loss behind the loss and deal with that underlying issue. You'll get much further if you can show people that Loss A is really unrelated to the dreaded, larger Loss B than if you simply try to talk them out of their reaction to Loss A.

it is not talking about a loss but rather pretending that it doesn't exist that stirs up trouble.

When endings take place, people get angry, sad, frightened, depressed, and confused. These emotional states can be mistaken for bad morale, but they aren't. They are the signs of grieving, the natural sequence of emotions people go through when they lose something that matters to them.

No pain, no gain," they say. But many change efforts fail because the people affected experience only the pain. The company may gain, but for employees it seems to be all loss. Trying to talk them out of their feelings will get you nowhere.

loss is a subjective experience, and your "objective" view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant.

This picture in people's heads is the reality they live in, and one of the losses that takes place during the ending phase of a transition is that the old picture—the mental image of how and why things are the way they are—falls apart. Much of the pain of the neutral zone comes from the fact that it is a time without a viable organizational picture.