Bereavement Quotes

My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living. ~ Pablo Neruda

She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness.What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relations in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy. ~ Omar El Akkad

Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn't magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning. ~ Carrie Jones

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking. ~ James Patterson

When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board. ~ William Boyd

Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ~ Helen Macdonald

Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering. ~ Brent Green

Not a sorrow, not a burden, not a temptation, not a bereavement, not a disappointment, not a care, not a groan or tear, but has its antidote in God's rich and inexhaustible resources. ~ George C. Lorimer

Everything assumes a different intensity when you are feeling the pain of loss. Be prepared. A minor annoyance that you might once have managed with a shrug now becomes a nuclear crisis! You are no doubt going to do things perfectly imperfectly. That is part of our path as humans. Forget about striving for perfection while dealing with grief! If you beat yourself up every time you forget something, have a breakdown, or don't do something correctly then you're going to end up very black and blue. I guarantee you won't want to look in the mirror! So be kinder and more patient with yourself. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

When we learn to attribute meaning to the events in our lives, we connect with our Higher Purpose, Higher Wisdom, or Source; we become Master of the Self. A gradual process, this is often tied to loss and to love. ~ Susan Barbara Apollon

Some of our fiercest battles are fought and won in silence. ~ Kianu Starr

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done ... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Then the pulse.
Then a pause.
Then twilight in a box.
Dusk underfoot.
Then generations.

-

Then the same war by a different name.
Wine splashing in the bucket.
The erection, the era.
Then exit Reason.
Then sadness without reason.
Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.

-

Then pages & pages of numbers.
Then the page with the faint green stain.
Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded,
is thrown onto a wagon.
Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else.
Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else.
Then the page scribbled in dactyls.
Then the page which begins Exit Angel.
Then the page wrapped around a dead fish.
Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean.
Then a nap.
Then the peg.
Then the page with the curious helmet.
Then the page on which millet is ground.
Then the death of Ursula.
Then the stone page they raised over her head.
Then the page made of grass which goes on.

-

Exit Beauty.

-

Then the page someone folded to mark her place.
Then the page on which nothing happens.
The page after this page.

Then the transcript.
Knocking within.

Interpretation, then harvest.

-

Exit Want.
Then a love story.

Then a trip to the ruins.
Then & only th ~ Srikanth Reddy

For I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

When someone is mourning, there is absolutely nothing you could say to alleviate their pain. Just sit with them, hold their hands, and be present and compassionate. ~ Anoir Ou-Chad

To lose what we have never owned might seem an eccentric bereavement, but Presumption has its own affliction as well as claim. ~ Emily Dickinson

You have no idea how grief will take you. The same with severe illness, motherhood, any profound experience. You don't know yourself. Others don't know you. These events show who you are. And you'll be surprised, shocked even. You'll feel the way you feel when you've done a particularly offensive-smelling shit – That couldn't possibly have come out of me – and start to rationalize it – Must be that bag of pistachios I ate earlier, or perhaps I am unwell. You can't believe you could do something so foul and unrecognizable. Something so outside yourself. ~ Viv Albertine

It is time to teach society on how to be empathetic with people grieving. ~ Nathalie Himmelrich

It's not that easy. Loss needs to be experienced. It should be felt in all it's beautiful and horrible ways. When your heart is shredded like fraying fabric and dangling in pieces, the scotch tape method isn't going to work long term. Careful stitching and honest grieving is necessary to put things back into place. Maybe not perfectly, but at least in a way so you can breathe again. ~ Chelsea Tolman

Some of the choices you make might not always turn out to be the best ones, but at least you are learning as you go. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

Don't let anyone tell you how long it will take for you to heal - but be aware that time is passing, whether you're healing or not. ~ Maryanne Pope

There are words like 'orphan', 'widow' and 'widower' in all languages. But there is no word in any language to describe a parent who loses a child. How does one describe the pain of 'ultimate bereavement'! (Page 50) ~ Neena Verma

Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life. ~ Caitlin Kittredge

The resurrection of Christ changed the midnight of bereavement into a sunrise of reunion; it changed the midnight of disappointment into a sunrise of joy; it changed the midnight of fear to a sunrise of peace. ~ Billy Graham

You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft. ~ William Shakespeare

friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. HENRI NOUWEN ~ Laura Petherbridge

Does a special love withstand the test of time? Like the grass that overcomes a 500lb slab of sidewalk concrete or the proverbial flower that shatters the stone, can Christ overcome the barriers and deep darkness of mortal moments? ~ Rob Guinan

Heaven and God are best discerned through tears; scarcely perhaps are discerned at all without them. The constant association of prayer with the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death suffice to show this. ~ James Martineau

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. ~ Rumi

Maybe there is no one way to deal with grief, but knowing that we're not totally alone is the best we can do. ~ Ann Benjamin

A thousand goodbyes come after death - the first six months of bereavement. ~ Allan Gregg

Words provided to me-- loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma-- never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one's attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes. ~ Yiyun Li

I see we have a problem.' Lucas gripped her other arm and gave her a non-too-gentle shake. 'Are you in a relationship? or...' Those dark eyes searching hers narrowed into slits. 'Are you married? ~ C.C. MacKenzie

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss - perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they'd cherished together.

She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They'd shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl. ~ Darrell Drake

Death and parting are the same. ~ Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf

Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

When a friend needs consoling, do not give in to the temptation of telling stories similar to theirs of disaster or bereavement. It is something people often do to show empathy but nothing is more tiresome than other people's problems when you want to focus on your own. Listening is by far the best form of consolation. ~ Giles Andreae

On grief. We know where we've been. We know where we want to be. ~ Wylie R. Weeks

There is never a right time to break someone's heart. And anyone with even a microgram of sensitivity in his or her body will agonise for an age over that timing. Only problem is there is always some reason not to make someone unhappy. The day a relationship end, if that relationship was at all important to the suckers involved, becomes as important an anniversary as a wedding day or birthday.
Obviously, the average person doesn't want to kick someone they once loved while that person is down.
It's not just hard times when someone is down that become obstacles to making your getaway. After times of bereavement, unemployment and general unhappiness, those events that should be happy ones also make some times off limits for the eager would- be dumper. Christmas, birthdays, Easter all impossible. A clever person with a sensitive lover that they sense is not quite as into them as he or she used to be, could starve off the inevitable for years by carefully spacing out this crucial dates. ~ Chris Manby

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement. ~ Joan Aiken

Over centuries, organised perpetrator groups have observed and studied the way in which extreme childhood traumas, such as accidents, bereavement, war, natural disasters, repeated hospitalisations and surgeries, and (most commonly) child abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) cause a child's mind to be split into compartments. Occult groups originally utilised this phenomenon to create alternative identities and what they believed to be "possession" by various spirits. In the twentieth century, probably beginning with the Nazis, other organised groups developed ways to harm children and deliberately structure their victims' minds in such a way that they would not remember what happened, or that if they began to remember they would disbelieve their own memories. Consequently, the memories of what has happened to a survivor are hidden within his or her inside parts. ~ Alison Miller

All the sorrows of life are bearable if only
we can convert them into a story. ~ Isak Dinesen

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. I will not try it. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother. ~ Jane Welsh Carlyle

When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now. ~ Jude Watson

For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And there's also 'To him that hath shall be given.' After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity. ~ C.S. Lewis

When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement. ~ Mark Twain

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail. ~ Donna Tartt

Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly both understandable and admirable, but it doesn't give you good reason to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other. If that person had died in different circumstances it would have been no less tragic. What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered or died, not that they died from a specific cause. By all means, the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one should be harnessed in order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives per se, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair on those we could have helped more. ~ William MacAskill

I knew you'd know," Mom said in a stabilizing, more confident, yet still husky voice. A smile broke across her face in the simple relief of her only remaining child not being shocked by the death of her youngest. She smiled genuinely, perhaps for the first time since cradling Dustin's body as the fire truck alarm blared towards the house in response to her 911 call. Her son had died that morning in her arms as she tried resuscitating him with her own breath, but the first indication of her daughter's reaction was calm. The child raised to expect death met the first moments of the news with seeming serenity. ~ Darcy Leech

We never truly "get over" a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

grief makes one hour ten. ~ William Shakespeare

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth. ~ Brent Green

It's time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement. ~ Sara Baume

Isn't she doing this too? Connecting and disconnecting. Facing grief then turning from it. One minute she is caught up in minutiae. Will her feet get sore standing in heels at the church? Have they made enough food? Will the kitten get scared by dozens of strangers in the house? Should she shut him in a room upstairs? The next moment she is weeping uncontrollably, taken over by pain so profound she can barely move. Then there was the salad bowl incident; her own fury scared her. But maybe these are different ways of dealing with events for all of them. Molly and Luke are infantile echos of her, their emotions paired down, their reactions simpler but similar. For if they have difficulty taking in what has happened, then so too does she. Why is she dressing up, for instance? Why can't she wear clothes to reflect the fact that she is at her lowest end? A tracksuit, a jumper full of holes, dirty jeans? Why can't she leave her hair a mess, her face unmade up? The crazed and grieving Karen doesn't care about her appearance. Yet she must go through with this charade, polish herself and her children to perfection. She, in particular, must hold it together. Oh, she can cry, yes, that's allowed. People expect that. They will sympathize. But what about screaming, howling, and hurling plates like she did yesterday? She imagines the shocked faces as she shouts and swears and smashes everything. But she is so angry, surely others must feel the same. Maybe a plate throwing ceremony would be ~ Sarah Rayner

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?
Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you. ~ Don DeLillo

Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement, Yes, we will all go together when we go. ~ Tom Lehrer

We communed together a moment, one with the other - I was deeply fascinated. At our first encounter I am sure I had a nebulous presentiment that I would one day go to it in spite of my hesitation, in spite of all the efforts put forth to hold me back, - and the emotion that overwhelmed me in the presence of the sea was not only one of fear, but I felt also an inexpressible sadness, and I seemed to feel the anguish of desolation, bereavement and exile. With downcast mien, and with hair blown about by the wind, I turned and ran home. I was in the extreme haste to be with my mother; I wished to embrace her and to cling close to her; I desired to be with her so that she might console me for the thousand indefinite, anticipated sorrows that surged through my heart at the sight of those green waters, so vast and so deep. ~ Pierre Loti

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader. ~ Karen Traviss

No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all is inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of one's soul - than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. ~ Joseph Conrad

There are recovery programs for people grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, or spouse. You can buy books on how to cope with the death of a beloved pet or work through the anguish of a miscarriage. We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You're on your own for that. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life. ~ Dean Koontz

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part. ~ Gail Caldwell

I wish I could hold time in my hands. I wish I could talk to it. Oh, how I would ask it to give me just a few more increments of its elusive power. How can something we can't touch or see have so much control over our lives.

It was time that took you too soon, too young, before I got to say all of the things I wanted to, needed to. Things you will never know. And I carry them like a weight, these words, these sentences, right in the middle of my chest, because they have nowhere else to go.

If only time had allowed me to understand the things I would want to say after you were gone. That's the thing. They told me "don't leave anything unsaid." But I didn't know what I wanted to say until it was too late, until you were gone. It was the time afterward that held all the wisdom. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid ... Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness. ~ Coleman Dowell

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life. It's hard to understand it at the time. Not one of us wants that thread when it is being woven in. Not one of us says, 'I can hardly wait to see where this is going to fit.' We all say at that moment, 'This is not the pattern I want. ~ Ravi Zacharias

They should make earplugs for people who are grieving, so we don't have to hear the stupid things people say, but I'd look like a dork in them. -Corinna ~ Carole Geithner

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you're like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you're alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin' Christmas spirit. ~ Anna White

You shall find it greatly mitigates the sorrow of bereavements, if before bereavement you shall have learned to surrender every day all the things which are dearest to you into the keeping of your gracious God. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I haven't been able to pray with the same unquestioned simplicity of hope since Dustin passed. My childhood ended the day my brother died. The naive hope that a miracle would save him, that he would one day walk, that a disease was a blessing in my family – that hope died with him. ~ Darcy Leech

It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological ...
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. ~ Anthony Storr

I don't feel quite normal if I haven't written for a while. I doubt I will ever again write anything as popular as the "Harry" books, but I can live with that thought quite easily. By the time I stop writing about Harry, I will have lived with him for 13 years, and I know it's going to feel like a bereavement. So I'll probably take some time off to grieve, and then on with the next book! ~ J.K. Rowling

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Beautiful lives women live - women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts - of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair - move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or any ability to hurt. ~ William Faulkner

I was walking along one day and smacked into this wall called hope deferred and depression and...grief.
And it wouldn't budge.
After some time, I realized this darkness I'd found myself in was called grief.
I'd been through so much trauma, everything about me- including my body, emotions and soul, was shutting down and going into preservation mode.
I entered a season where the battle caught up with me and I realized just how badly I'd been beaten and torn up, inside and out. ~ Ashley Nikole

I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the deep, because the women around me showed me what healing looks like. ~ Anna White

I've been through cancer, divorce, loss and bereavement, but they are things most humans go through. ~ Olivia Newton-John

The death of a beloved is an amputation. ~ C.S. Lewis

How very softly you tiptoed into our world, almost silently, only a moment you stayed. But what an imprint your footsteps have left upon our hearts ~ Dorothy Ferguson

I began to feel that nature itself was nurturing me, reminding me that life still offered beauty and calm, and that I was also made out of these elements. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates. ~ Samuel Johnson

I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone's fickle brain . . . ~ Brian M. Holmes

Each loss brings growth with it, and learning to handle new experiences and taking charge of your needs is part of the transformative process. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind
and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. ~ William Faulkner

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms. ~ Lurlene McDaniel

We're all of us, always on the edge of bereavement. ~ Lisa Mannetti

As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents' bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss. ~ Robert J. Wiersema

What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have "lost" is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from the sky, and I take heart again, glad they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death…Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone on are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow on the joy of the departed…Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them. ~ Helen Keller

It's being without him that I'll never get used to. ~ Christopher Buecheler

Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them. Was this my future? Every moment, every tiny thing I saw and did and touched, weighted by loss. Every space in this house and
my town and the world in general, empty in a way that could never be filled. ~ Jennifer Castle

The love has got to be bigger than everything else. The isolation, the separation, the danger. When the love is bigger than all of that – you just do it. You pay the price in uncertainty and sometimes bereavement, because every moment you're together is worth the cost. ~ Thea Harrison

Bereavement in Texas is a time to pull out your best recipes. ~ Lisa Kleypas

There is no right or wrong way to grief. There is only one way - your way! ~ Mark Alexander

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief; ~ William Cullen Bryant

Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite part of the aging process and the human experience. ~ Brent Green

May you know always that you are never alone, that life and love are eternal, and that you are extraordinary. ~ Susan Barbara Apollon