Quotes About Loss

We'd have long conversations during which I'd weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn't hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything?

All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.

I can't do this," he kept repeating through his tears. "I can't live without Mom. I can't. I can't. I can't." "We have to," I replied, though I couldn't believe it myself.

I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.

So I started in, but I could not go on. Each word I spoke erased itself in the air.

She'd been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.

You should see a therapist, everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately—in the depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike—I had. But I didn't keep the faith. I never did call the other therapist Vince had recommended. I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath. I

As I read, I could feel my mother's presence so acutely, her absence so profoundly, that it was hard to focus on the words.

I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn't let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.

It will never be okay," a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. "It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours.

The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young," she wrote. "When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother.

There was no mother at our college graduations. There was no mother at our weddings. There was no mother when we sold our first books. There was no mother when our children were born. There was no mother, ever, at any turn for either one of us in our entire adult lives and there never will be. The same is true for

Small things such as this have saved me: How much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.

You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what's horribly true.

People die because they want who they want. They do all kinds of crazy, stupid, sweet, tender, amazing, self-destructive things. You aren't going to make anyone "see the light and realize that what they're doing is wrong." You just aren't.

I wasn't with my mom when she died. No one was. She died alone in a hospital room, and for so many years it felt like three-quarters of my insides were frozen solid because of that.

Who cares if one more light goes out? In a sky of a million stars It flickers, flickers

Marie Snyder's dead, and here you are laughin' about it." "We're all gonna be dead sooner or later," Eddie said. "Maybe it ain't funny, but it ain't no great tragedy neither.