Quotes About Loss

tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt. It has stayed snapped, it never grew back.

She wanted to be dead and she wanted her daughter to be dead too so that neither of them would have to face the unbearable business of continuing on. It

The truth is, Bob, they need those immigrants. Maine's been losing its young people—you and I are a perfect case in point. And the truth also is: That's sad.

It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss, and I had been finding that to be

He had died on his bed, the same bed that my father had died on many years earlier.

Pete's death. It felt to me as though my entire childhood had died. You might think—I would have thought—that I wanted every part of my childhood gone. But I did

I had often thought before: that there had been a last time—when they were little—that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh, honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.

Il silenzio, là dove avevano riecheggiato per tanti anni il suono della voce di Pam, le sue chiacchiere, le risate, le opinioni taglienti, gli improvvisi scoppi di pianto. L'assenza di tutto questo, il silenzio di una doccia che non scorreva, di cassetti che non si aprivano, perfino il silenzio di se stesso, che quando rientrava in casa non parlava, non raccontava a nessuno la sua giornata. Quel silenzio quasi lo uccideva.

And thinking of this now made me think of something I had often thought before: that there had been a last time - when they were little - that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.

Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew too that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release.

am in mourning for my life." It took me a moment. We were

Isabelle, at different places and moments in the years to come, would sometimes be surrounded by silence and find in herself only the repeated word "Amy." "Amy, Amy"—for this was it, her heart's call, her prayer. "Amy," she would think, "Amy," remembering this day's chilly, golden air.

you don't feel jealous of a woman whose husband has been lost. But an unreachability, that's how she'd put it. This plump, kind-natured woman sitting on the couch surrounded by children

But there is this: Both with the discovery of David's illness, and then again with his death, it was William I called first. I think—but I don't remember—that I must have said something like "Oh William, help me." Because he did. He got my husband to a different doctor—a better one, I do believe—although there was nothing any doctor could do at that point. And then, with the death, William helped me again.

At David's service in a funeral home in the city—which was then, and is now, all a blur to me—I do remember Becka whispering to me, "Dad wishes he could sit up here with us." "He said that to you?" I asked, turning to look at her, and she nodded solemnly. Poor William, I thought.

Driving home, Tommy was aware of a sensation like that of a tire becoming flat, as though he had been filled—all his life—with some sustaining air, and it was gone now; he felt, increasingly as he drove, a sense of fear.

Throughout my marriage to William, I had had the image—and this was true even when Catherine was alive, and more so after she died—so often I had the private image of William and me as Hansel and Gretel, two small kids lost in the woods looking for the breadcrumbs that could lead us home.

I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone. Because it was. I knew this was true.

grief is a solitary matter.

deprivations never leave us.

This is because my husband had died a year earlier; also I am often despondent at the end of a book tour, and this had been made worse because I no longer had David to call from the road. That was the hardest part of the tour for me: not having David to speak to each day.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?