Quotes About Loss

Sloth is the tempter that beguiles and expels from paradise.

Do I know that? How the hell can I possibly know that? Only a few hours earlier, Chris, my beloved husband of twenty years, jumped to his death off the roof of a parking garage a mile from our home. Cops came to the house in a pair to tell me, just like in the movies. Ding-dong, your husband's dead. Your life is over. Except it's not.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn't, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn't love them.

Oh, it's very hard, "Clare says, sitting down slowly and not too close. "Oh, I miss him so much. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know that I would be like this, that this is what happens when you love someone like that. I had no idea. No one says, There's no happy ending at all. No one says, If you could look ahead, you might want to stop now. I know, I know, I know I was lucky. I was luckier than anyone to have had what I had. I know now. I do, really.

She suffered from the opposite of "phantom limb" syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.

I wish I'd thrown my arms around Gus's neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.

When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.

Those of us who knew him and needed him didn't want to stop grieving, for fear we'd step forward, toward the future, and entirely lose the trace, the smell, and the feel of him.

The United States spent over $1 trillion on the war in Iraq; some 4,500 American lives were lost. Yet fourteen years after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran's power is ascendant, with Tehran now wielding more influence over Baghdad than Washington.

My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it. Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me.

Before my dad died I saw the world as a place. By "place" I mean space. Fixed. Space did not move, but people moved in space. People and space could touch each other, but not very deeply. After he died, I saw that people and space are permeable to each other in a way that people and people are not. I saw that space is like water. People can go inside it.

I waned him back. I wanted him back so much I couldn't think about anything else. Everywhere I looked was suddenly somewhere Danny wasn't. My hands were empty because Danny wasn't holding them. My room echoed with quiet because Danny wasn't there whispering ridiculous things to make me laugh, or make me shiver. It seemed so right. Danny was mine, I was his, and that wasn't going to work if he was dead. So I would make him not dead, anymore.

The fact that I'm sitting here in the chilly leaves imagining ways to get rid of the boy I loved so much I brought him back from the dead is so ridiculous, so horrifying, it's almost funny. In an unbelievable, black humor way that's not really funny at all.

Life goes by really fast, and it seems that there are times when you're burying a lot of friends and family. And then there are times that feel really precious and everybody is doing okay. This is one of those times.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.

Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.

Just as he heralded the importance of expressing other kinds of emotions, Fred felt it essential to give others permission to grieve over the losses in their lives. He learned that lesson himself when he was six years old.

Death may feel like an amputation at the time of the loss, but if the connection is still vibrant, perhaps those aren't phantom pains haunting us but the spirit of love.

Despite his strength, Jim lost his battle with cancer. Fred understood that sometimes God's answer to prayer is no. But he understood something else too: "Jim gave us all an enormous gift by helping us understand the many forms of healing (not just physical) in this life.

I thought your boyfriend died?" Nicky asked, and it was actually a good question, and I was so mad that I wasn't even embarrassed to answer him. "We were three," I choked out. "I had a night lover and a day lover," I said, and it felt like poetry, just to say it there in public in the middle of the quad, under the foggy sun. "And they loved each other like night loves the day. And then the night lover died, and the day lover and I were naked in the sunshine, with only ourselves for cover.