Quotes About Loss

He could take happiness from her, but could he give any?

She got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn't smell Tibby's smell in the way you couldn't smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.

Sometimes when she thought of Eric, and now more powerfully when she saw him, she felt some achy nostalgia for her old self. For the dauntless, daring soul she used to be. There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone.

The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who'd missed everything.

Era triste per quello che era successo a Kostos. E da qualche parte era triste perché gente come Bee e Kostos, che avevano perso tutto, erano ancora aperti all'amore, e lei che non aveva perso nulla non lo era.

Because they forgot and I remembered. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves.

He'd given up blessings he hadn't been worthy of for the chance to be with her, and now he'd lost that, too.

The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people, full of people too broken to lean on.

Toda su vida desde que Bailey había muerto le parecía de pronto como el vagabundeo lejano de un amnésico, lleno de confusión y olvido.

The angels come to visit us,          and we only know them   when they are gone.     ââ'¬â€George Eliot

And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.

Tragedy brought some families together maybe, but not hers... Maybe if she'd tried hard enough she could have kept them feeling like a family and kept her home feeling like a home. Instead, they seemed to float out from under the roof, off into the stratosphere, farther and farther apart, orbiting nothing.

That seemed a sad thing about human nature - how much more time we spend thinking about what we don' have, or have lost, than about what we have.

Was it only possible truly to enjoy something if you knew there was a danger that it might be taken away?

Jennifer's father, Randy Ertman, summarized our feelings toward Medellin in his statement to the court when the last three defendants were sentenced to death: "I hope you rot in hell. I honest to God mean that. I hope they rot in hell, sir. I hope to be there when you die, you sick pieces of (censored). Thank you, Your Honor, for allowing me to speak. I appreciate it, sir."15 That doesn't move the story along; I just admired his eloquence.

We were not criminals. We're mothers. The difference was I was not an authenticated mother. I was an illegal mother. I was a denied mother. And I had to come home and live my life after being robbed of my child. It's as if I was an unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child. So you have to live with the trauma of losing your child and then you have to live with the trauma of knowing you didn't stop it. How do you do that?

She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize

We spend so much of our grief looking for answers to explain what cannot be explained.

Birthdays of a child who has died are strange events.

Even after Mr. Kingbridge and Mrs. Amer left the stage, no one moved. The thought of going to class seemed absurd, but there really wasn't anything we could do except cry. For Amelia. For her family. And for ourselves. We (practically every member of the Baby-sitters Club) sat in the auditorium for nearly an hour. Every few minutes one of us would break down and cry. It just didn't seem possible that something so awful could have happened to someone our age, someone we knew.

Reverend Downey tried to focus the service on remembering happy days with Amelia, but all I could think about was the unfairness of life. How was it possible that an irresponsible drunk could cause an accident, kill a perfectly innocent girl and walk away almost without a scratch? There seemed to be no justice in the world.

I felt invisible. Nobody had said anything to me since that comment about the celebratory salad. I wished desperately that Mimi were alive. If she were, she'd have been sitting right next to me and she would have known how I was feeling. She'd have shared in Janine's triumph, but then she would have said to me, "Tell me, my Claudia, how was your club meeting today? Did you get any baby-sitting jobs?" Mimi always knew the right thing to say.

The burial service began. It was quite short, but Stacey remembers much more about it than I do. All I remember is thinking, as the casket was being lowered into the ground, Mimi's not in there. So I didn't cry. A bunch of men were just putting a box in the ground. That was all. Then Mom made me throw a white rose into the hole. I thought, What's the point? Mimi won't see it, but I did it anyway (since we were being formal).