Quotes About Loss

The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.

I remember reading a divorced woman's experience of getting to know a new lover after her decades-long marriage ended: "I will never lock eyes in the delivery room with David," she wrote. "I've never met his mother.

But if I live in the present, I'll have to accept the loss of my future. Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?

John said that when he was struggling with the pressure of his marriage and his career, he used to think that there'd be a point when he'd be happy again, and then when Gabe died, he thought he'd never be happy again. Now, he says, he's come to feel it's not either/or, yes or no, always or never. "Maybe happiness is sometimes,

Relationships in life don't really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate

We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the

I've sat with patients who describe their grief as "monstrous" and "unbearable"; one patient, quoting something she heard, said it made her feel "alternately numb and in excruciating pain.

As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same. To help John, I'm going to have to figure out what his loss would be,

How can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply – but it's also a gift, the gift of being alive.

In fact, Wendell continues, I've lost more than my relationship in the present. I've lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we're creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret.

This was grief: You laugh. You cry. Repeat.

She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.

I can't walk away from someone I love without saying 'I love you' one last time. I've known how very much I've loved you for a long time. You think I'm a child and I know nothing about the world or about love. But I know about love. I know about loss. And I know about loneliness, and goodbyes, and about never being able to voice those feelings again. "Perhaps you've said those words, Richard, and don't mean them. But I never have.

It's much harder to find the strength to live your life when those you love are gone." He

To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.

I suppose no one is truly dead when we go on loving them.

Our losses become the road maps for our future.

She believes that her daughter was in agony and that she chose not to suffer; she needs to believe that through her death Kim now lives on a higher plane. Why else are flowers so beautiful? she says to me. why is the sky such a perfect shade of blue? There has to be more than the here and now.

I did not very often consider the reasons my father died. I didn't believe his life was taken to instill some larger meaning in my character, or make me a better person. I preferred to believe that a person might be taken for no reason other than the random winds of chance, the same forces that could create a brilliant sky after a terrible storm.

Grief doesn't feel as if a rug has been pulled out from under her. There is no rug. There is no floor on which to lay a rug. There is no ground on which to build a floor to lay a rug.

Grief made you selfish; engulfed as you were in your own pain, it was hard to remember the others were suffering too.

None of us knows how long any one of us has left. It could be fifty hours, could be fifty years. We're just glad we're here today. And we won't forget those who aren't.

The pain of losing people you love is the price of the ticket for getting to know them at all.

I am homesick and I am timesick . . . I miss all that no longer is, Lil says.