Quotes About Loss

He couldn't count them all. Nobody taught him how to count past ten. Such losses were beyond his comprehension.

You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.

The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day.

He passed through her with his soul caressing hers goodbye. And in that final hour he was with her one last time.

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.

This was not [him]. It was a thing, with all the [him]-ness gone from it. Death takes the person and leaves his shell behind, like a hollowed-out tree.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

Funerals seem less about comforting the souls of these dearly departed than aboutcomforting the people they leave behind.

Someone dies, there oughta be something. It oughta shake the world! You're not supposed to walk away!

Tears aren't for the people we've lost. They're for us. So we can remember, and celebrate, and miss them, and feel human.

Stop your weeping. Grief is for the dead.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.

All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die

I felt like the sky around me was closing me in. Trapping me in some sort of bubble where time stands still and grief would linger on forever.

I wish R.I.P meant Return If Possible...

People do not die from suicide. They die from sadness.

Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: "Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead." That's how she said it.

But now the other half of "us" was gone and, lying there in my shadowy room, I'd be struck with this realization that I had no clue how to be just me again.

No matter how ugly the manner in which a man dies, it's only the presence of a suffering human soul that is horrifying, once gone, what is left is only an object.

Death is a dark flower, its perfume heady and dangerous as it pulls you into its bosom.

No matter how careful we are, if we live long enough, eventually one of us will die. It is not a happy thought, but it is the truth. Such is the way of the world.