Quotes About Loss

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol ... slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.

K H A D I J A S A Y S . . . In Kashmir when we wake up and say 'Good Morning' what we really mean is 'Good Mourning'.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.

The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.

Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They would be. Ever. Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died.

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.

Lose your dreams and you Will lose your mind.

And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.

All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.

But around her, the air was sad, somehow. And behind the smile in her eyes, the Grief was a fresh, shining blue. Because of a calamitous car crash. Because of a Joe-shaped hole in the universe.

She described how, when her brother's body was found in a field and brought home, his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.

In Kashmir when we wake up and say "Good Morning" what we really mean is "Good Mourning.

Who was he mourning? She didn't know. A whole generation maybe.

A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over

A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life it purloined.

When the last soldier has gone, the people climb over the debris of the burnt house. The tin sheets that were once the roof are still smouldering. A scorched trunk lies open, flames still leaping out of it. What was in it that burns so beautifully?

His rejection of her in life (gentle and compassionate though it was) was neutralized by death. In her memory of him, he embraced her. Just her. In the way a man embraces a woman.

In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir's grief and loss.

In remote border areas, near the Line of Control, the speed and regularity with which the bodies turned up, and the condition some of them were in, wasn't easy to cope with. Some were delivered in sacks, some in small polythene bags, just pieces of flesh, some hair and teeth. Notes pinned to them by the quartermasters of death said: 1kg, 27 kg, 500 g.