Quotes About Loss

Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight vacancy of a cripple. He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.

Uchiyama R?shi used to say again and again that loss is enlightenment, gain is illusion.

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing—a childless mother.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...

If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.

If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?

Your twin brother is, as you said, an abandoned house. If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.

I learned that there are two young men lost in the woods. Not one. Two....I may never find one of the young men....He has been gone so long. The odds, I'm afraid may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.

I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.

Once I asked Ma who'd taken the picture, but she couldn't remember. Maybe Ma's death took it, I thought. Maybe it was laughing back at her, knowing everything that would happen, as she posed in happy ignorance. In Ma's young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.

What had happened was going to be always on me, in me, as permanent as one of Roberta's tattoos. "Dolores," I said. I repeated my name over and over until it sounded warped and unreal. I was never going to be myself again.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone.

I kept changing the station, over and over around the dial, but all I got were those two channels, or snow. I had spent half my life watching TV. I thought again about the paperweight. I'd had it less than a week when I shook too hard and accidentally sent it flying across my bedroom where it hit the floor and cracked. Leaked, became useless. At the time, it was my biggest tragedy—breaking that paperweight.

He sat down on one of the pilings looking sick and sad and I knew he was thinking about Ma and the baby. I wanted badly to cheer him up but singing commercials seemed the wrong thing to do.

If you squinted while looking at her from across a room, you would swear Mrs. Nord was Jackie Kennedy. My own mother sat alone on Bobolink Drive all day, talking to her parakeet, Petey, and worrying about dead children. Around the time of our move to Bobolink Drive, I stopped kissing my mother on the lips. It had been over four years since she'd lost the baby.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That

My vision blurred over with tears.

We buried my husband, Claude, today, finally. Me and Belinda Jean. His emphysema took him nine days ago, but the wake and funeral had to be put off because of the flood. McPadden's Funeral Parlor was in the water's path.

The other day I was looking for something in the bedroom closet and got an unexpected whiff of him from one of his sweaters . . ." His face crumpled up but he fought off crying. "The pain is almost physical, sometimes. I missed him so much that day that it gave me a bloody nose—just started bleeding for no reason. Hadn't

there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.

He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile—fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise's. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she'd be alive. Things would be normal. "You're normal!" she'd said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.

I Think it is lost.....but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost . The body sluggish, aged, cold, the ember left from earlier fires shall duly flame again.