Quotes About Loss

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief is experience in later life.

Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn't here.

I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, 'reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost'.

Concentrate on why you're here, I tell myself. You have a hawk to fly. Ever since my father died I'd had these bouts of derealisation, strange episodes where the world became unrecognisable.

And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones.

But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes.

His glasses, carefully folded, placed in my mum's outstretched hand. His coat. An envelope. His watch. His shoes. And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there,

And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there, a frieze of motionless cumulus over the Thames flat as a matte painting on glass.

cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,' he wrote in his diary. 'The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.' His

The archeology of grief is not ordered.

I remembered the man I'd fallen for after my father died. I'd hardly known him, but it didn't matter. I'd recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed.

all of us were clinging to a world already gone.

So I leaned over the bed and spoke to my father who was not there. I addressed him seriously and carefully. I told him that I loved him and missed him and would miss him always. And I talked on, explaining things to him, things I cannot now remember but which at the time were of clear and burning importance. Then there was silence. And I waited. I did not know why. Until I realised it was in hope that an answer might come. And then I knew it was over.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.

I read that after denial comes grief. Or anger. Or guilt.

That was the great puzzle, and it was played out again and again. How hearts do stop.

That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I'd taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn't want to ever return.

My vision blurs. We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father's legs gone, the woman's torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows.

I miss her. So much that sometimes I'm scared I'll bring her back.

She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable.