Quotes About Loss

Judith is whimpering, Susanna clutching her hand, so Agnes misses the moment, she misses seeing her son, the shroud see sewed for him, disappearing from view, entering the dark black river-sodden earth. It was there one moment, then she dipped her head to look at Judith and then it was gone. Never to be seen again.

It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I'm told it's perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.

Hamnet wills that it is Judith that is to live.

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard.

There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way.

To walk by his grave every Sunday is both a pain and a pleasure. She wants to lie there so that her body covers it. She wants to dig down with her bare hands. She wants to strike it with a tree branch. She wants to build a structure over it, to shield it from the wind and the rain. Perhaps she would come to live in it, there, with him.

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives . . . The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

Maggie O'Farrell

when he came off the beach. She would not see him again. She fought like a crazed thing. She fought to live, she fought to come back. She has always wanted to tell him this, in some way. She tried. She would like to say to him, Theo, I tried. I fought because I didn't see how I could leave you. But I lost.

Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.

Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone.

we were both trying to see the people we had been, those ghost selves who no longer existed, those able-bodied bipeds who never thought twice about the miracle of independent movement, who had been swallowed inside the sessile, atrophied beings we now were. I

And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.

Her silver spoon was gone. She wasn't coming back.

I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn't know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.

If they Brought you back the old cafes, who will bring you back the old friends?

Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my last poem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from me only the words dedicated to my wife's heart.

Out of my ignorance, I called you a homeland and I forgot homelands are taken away.

And in your absence, I cried like I never did before I cried with all senses I cried as if I'm raining As if I'm melting all at once.

After you nothing goes and nothing returns.

The wars will end and the leaders will shake hands, and that old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son, and that girl will wait for her beloved husband, and the children will wait for their heroic father, I do not know who sold the homeland but I know who paid the price.