Quotes About Loss

The Parks Department continued to cut down trees, removing a sick elm to save the remaining twenty, then removing another to save the remaining nineteen, and so on and so on until only the half-tree remained in front of the Lisbons' old house. Nobody could bear to watch when they came for it (Tim Winer compared the tree to the last speaker of Manx)

He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents' house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

Mr. Lisbon continued to go to work in the mornings and the family continued to attend church on Sundays, but that was it. The house receded behind its mists of youth being choked off

At the same time, the fact that the girls were slowly sinking hadn't completely penetrated our minds, and on some mornings we awoke to a world still unruptured: we stretched, we got out of bed, and only after rubbing our eyes at the window did we remember the rotting house across the street, and the mossblackened windows hiding the girls from our sight. The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.

No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table—would there be any trace of me?

No, it's not a 'corpse thing.' I feel I lack the emotional capacity to deal with those in mourning...

Nadine would never forget this death because it had been her eighth birthday. Arleen had come home late, striding into the trailer in wet underwear carrying a boxed cake so warm the frosted flowers had melted off the top. To this day, those innocuous cake boxes with the clear-plastic tops made Nadine's stomach clench.

Almost imperceptibly, the rawness of her grief dulled, but sometimes she would find herself swept up in a wave of sorrow so sudden and powerful that it took her breath away.

The Todd sisters all had survived tragedy. They all had endured loss—parents, husbands, children, whole nations and noble causes, all had fallen away, lost to time. If they could not rise above their old resentments to help a sister in need, would it not be said that they had learned nothing from their own suffering?

anguished grieving. To Elizabeth Mrs. Lincoln

As far as I'm concerned the last good man went when Elvis died.

You don't believe in unconditional love. Neither does Alex. So you both threw away the best thing you ever had because you didn't believe in each other or yourselves.

You leave a place and people and after a while, you change, they change and whatever it was that connected you to begin with is gone forever

Your friend mourns your losses with you, because they experience them too. The truth is, no matter how lonely you might feel, you're never going through anything alone....you can choose your family.

There are heartaches in life, painful things that happen and disappointments that steal away dreams.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you'd read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

A girl named Jo once had a life / But that's gone now; she's only wife.

I miss him all the time. I shook my head, disgusted at my own mopiness. It's like being haunted or something. And I don't have the luxury of being haunted right now. I need to think about myself...

The first time around, she'd done the surgeries, the radiation, the chemotherapy. She'd lost her hair, lost her appetite and her energy, lost her left breast and six months of her life.

Jo inhaled slowly, trying to think of all the time she'd had with her granddaughters, and not everything that she'd miss.

How could I live a life where the person who'd built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who'd seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?

In the Jewish tradition, when someone dies, we say 'Baruch dayan ha'emet,' which means 'Blessed is the true judge.' " He looked at me, his eyes intent. "God knows your friend. God knows her heart. Who she was, and who she was trying to become.

Sometimes I wish it has been you.