Child Loss Quotes

Standing on the edge with my patients - abiding with them - means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could. ~ Christine Montross

It was a phone call she didn't want to make. She didn't want to hurt him. Whatever words she gave him, it would take being a daddy away from him. ~ Crissi Langwell

There are many different ways in which individuals express, experience, and adapt to grief. Understanding and accepting different ways of grieving lies at the heart of surviving your loss as a couple. Understanding is helpful but not absolutely necessary. Acceptance of your partner's approach however is a necessity. If you have not reached acceptance, make it your first priority. ~ Nathalie Himmelrich

Trust your partner's way of coping to be the best they are able to do and be at every moment in time. ~ Nathalie Himmelrich

Another year passed on . The waves of time seemed long since to have swept away all trace of poor Mary Barton. But her husband still thought of her, although with a calm and quiet grief, in the silent watches of the night :And Mary would start from her hard-earned sleep,and think in her half dreamy, half awakened state, she saw her mother stand by her bed-side ,as she used to do 'in the days of long-ago'; with shaded candle and an expression of ineffable tenderness, while she looked on her sleeping child. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing, loss to become whoever they are "meant" to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. ~ Megan Devine

If we've been born once already (which we know we have) why then is it so hard for some to believe that we've been born before? The answer to that is nothing other than the information about life one has previously received. ~ Renée Chae

Child loss is not an event, it's an indescribable journey of survival ~ Unknown

That's my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn't like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better. ~ Paula Hawkins

Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child. ~ Lynda Cheldelin Fell

Time can lessen the hurt; the empty place we have can seem smaller as other things and experiences fill our life; we can forget for periods and feel as if our loved one didn't die; we can find sense in the death and understand that perhaps this death does fit into a bigger design in the world; we can learn to remember the good and hold on to that.
But we cannot 'get over it,' because to get over it would mean we were not changed by the experience. It would mean we did not grow by the experience. It would mean that our loved one's death made no difference in our life.
There is an interesting discussion in the Talmud, an ancient Jewish writing. Those Jews had the custom of rending their garments - literally tearing their clothes - to symbolize the ripping apart that death brings. But the question was raised, after the period of mourning, could you sew the garment up and use it again? The teachers answered yes, but when you mended it, you should not tuck the edges under so it would look as if it had never been torn. This symbolized the fact that life after grief is not the same as before. The rent will show. ~ Deborah Spungen

This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over. ~ Ann Hood

By simply stating the truth, we open conversations about grief, which are really conversations about love. We start to love one another better. We begin to overhaul the falsely redemptive storyline that has us, as a culture and as individuals, insist that there's a happy ending everywhere if only we look hard enough. We stop blaming each other for our pain, and instead, work together to change what can be changed, and withstand what can't be fixed. We get more comfortable with hearing the truth, even when the truth breaks our hearts. ~ Megan Devine

The way he said it spoke of an ache I recognized. I knew that no matter how similar they were, no two losses were the same, but despite his loss being from a different circumstance, I felt his sadness as my own. We sat there in silence with my hand resting in his. My bandage told its own stories while we remembered the girl who taught Randolf such a valuable lesson about the small turning into the large. ~ J.D. Brewer

If you can't tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark storyline. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it. The trees will not ask, "How are you really?" and the wind doesn't care if you cry. ~ Megan Devine

All those encouragements from others about having so much to live for, that there's still goodness to come in your life --- they feel irrelevant. They kind of are irrelevant. You can't cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief. ~ Megan Devine

Grieving is intense and it is non-stop intense. Even if things are quiet, and you're sitting there in your chair, kind of staring off into space, inside, the intensity is raging. - Lori Ennis ~ Nathalie Himmelrich

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! ~ Cynthia Ozick

We do not "get over" a death. We learn to carry the grief and integrate the loss in our lives. In our hearts, we carry those who have died. We grieve and we love. We remember. ~ Nathalie Himmelrich

Embrace the pain ~ Jude Gibbs

The beat of her heart, the slow burning away ... of the bitter fires of the devil's arcade. ~ Bruce Springsteen

When someone you love dies, you don't just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be. ~ Megan Devine

We've got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you're either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you're going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before.
Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.
It doesn't seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window. ~ Megan Devine

Things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "You'll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this" brings out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they're being insulted but can't figure out how.
It's not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There's a hidden subtext in those statements about becoming a better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what's "truly important in life" now that you've learned how quickly life can change.
The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren't aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren't kind, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your "true path" in life.
As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind. ~ Megan Devine

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.

-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue ~ Ariel Levy

Repeating a grade needs to be the last resort, not an automatic response to a child who is struggling to learn. ~ Roy Barnes

Yeah the world as I see it, is a remarkable place
Every man makes a difference and every mother's child is a saint
From a birds eye view I can see, we are spiraling down in gravity
From a birds eye view I can see, you are just like me
((The World as I see It)) ~ Jason Mraz

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out. ~ Tom Hiddleston

Let me say right now for the record,
I'm still going to be here
asking this world to dance,
even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet.

You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.

Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so so much for the light to give
each of us at each other's backs
whispering over and over and over,
"Live. Live. Live. ~ Andrea Gibson

All the Scriptural metaphors about the death of the seed that falls into the ground, about losing one's life, about becoming the least in the kingdom, about the world's passing away - all these go on to something unspeakably better and more glorious. Loss and death are only the preludes to gain and life. It was a temptation to foreshorten the promises, to look for some prompt fulfillment of the loss-gain principle…. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Lowering my chin, I sighed. What my Seth wanted, I wanted, but ... daimons? I rubbed my hands on my bent knees and sighed again - louder, like a petulant child.
Aiden's back twisted as he turned his head. "What, Alex?"
"Nothing," I mumbled.
"There's something." He leaned back, tipping his head against the bar. "You have that tone."
I frowned at the wall. "What tone?"
"The 'I have something I want to say but I shouldn't' tone" A little bit of humor seeped into his voice. "I'm well familiar with it."
Well ... damn. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

When he hung over the death-bed of his infant son Ibrahim, resignation to the Will of God was exhibited in his conduct under this keenest of afflictions; and the hope of soon rejoining his child in paradise was his consolation. When he followed him to the grave, he invoked his spirit, in the awful examination of the tomb, to hold fast to the foundations of the faith, the Unity of God, and his own mission as a Prophet. ~ Washington Irving

First I lost weight, then I lost my voice, and now I've lost Onassis. ~ Maria Callas

When you become a parent, you look at your parents differently. You look at being a child differently. It's an awakening, a revelation that you have. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

It's not like I wake up every morning and just can't wait to write. It is my job. It's much easier to not write. I'd rather read. This is my income. This is what supports my family. Having a child is a pretty big incentive to keep working. ~ Chevy Stevens

I ... understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't. ~ Jodi Picoult

We did not think about the personal nature of killing in the air. We were proud of every victory in the air, and particularly happy that we had not been hit ourselves. Of course, I tell myself in quiet moments today: 'You've killed. In order to protect others and not be killed yourself.' But in the end: for what? The Third Reich trained 30,000 pilots. Ten thousand survived the war. One-third. This is the highest loss rate along with the U-boat sailors. ~ Gunther Rall

marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman... Marriage is a covenant between a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other. To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outlaw, a slave, or a traitor. The one constant in every society of human kind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults. ~ Orson Scott Card

Love is the child that breathes our breath. Love is the child that scatters death. ~ William Blake

Don't curse a child for doing childish things, but don't 'courage him none neither. ~ T. Geronimo Johnson

Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west...We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another...Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned. ~ Nawal El Saadawi

Inspiration is everywhere. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

DONOVAN: Court's a good leader. He doesn't hold my hand or treat anyone like a child. He's kicked a few *sses when guys went off script to make their own moves. Once he even scared the sh*t out of one of the older guys. ~ Bijou Hunter

There's a part of you that always remains a child, no matter how mature you get, how sophisticated or weary. ~ Barbra Streisand

When I was a child, my father used to encourage my brother and me to fail. At the dinner table, instead of asking about the best part of our day, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something to tell him, he would be disappointed. When we shared whatever failure we'd endured, he'd high-five us and say, 'Way to go!' The gift my father gave us by doing this was redefining what failure truly meant. ~ Sara Blakely

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning. ~ Barbara G. Walker

I must say that I have always felt that, in the deepest sense, we are all brothers. Class distinctions have never meant anything to me; and hatred of tyranny is in my blood. Even as a small child I could never bear injustice of any kind. It offends my sense of the beautiful. It is so stupid and unaesthetic. I remember my feelings when I was first unjustly punished by my nurse. It wasn't the punishment itself which I resented; it was the clumsiness, the lack of imagination behind it. That, I remember, pained me very deeply. ~ Christopher Isherwood

How we take it for granted – those trivial conversations; those mundane moments that we think hold no meaning. We never realise how much we rely on the ordinariness of everyday life. When love is gone – when our entire world is gone – only then do we understand those moments are what we live for. ~ Dianna Hardy

Today is [the feast of] Santa Rita, Patron Saint of impossible things - but this seems impossible: let us ask of her this grace, this grace that all, all, all people would do good and that we would encounter one another in this work, which is a work of creation, like the creation of the Father. A work of the family, because we are all children of God, all of us, all of us! And God loves us, all of us! May Santa Rita grant us this grace, which seems almost impossible. Amen. ~ Pope Francis

Your body is the child of the soul. you must nourish and train that child. ~ B.K.S. Iyengar

It is unfortunate that the poor judgment shown by a small group of young actors has tarnished the reputation of every child who has ever appeared before a camera. ~ Fred Savage

Child, people always look for guilt outside themselves. A person chooses the role of the victim. ~ Johanna Verweerd

Sweetness! World needs sweetness! It needs a sweet child, a sweet dolphin, a sweet monkey; it needs sweet people to soften the callous hearts! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

My dream would be a multicultural society, one that is diverse and where every man, woman and child are treated equally. I dream of a world where all people of all races work together in harmony. ~ Nelson Mandela

I have nothing to lose. My personal casualty means nothing. ~ Christopher Dorner

It has been said that the hardest job in the world is raising a child, but the people who says this have probably never worked at a comb factory or captured pirates on the high seas. ~ Lemony Snicket

A Mother's love is something that no one can explain, It is made of deep devotion and of sacrifice and pain, It is endless and unselfish and enduring come what may For nothing can destroy it or take that love away ~ Helen Steiner Rice

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss. ~ Mary Ellen Chase

If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion ~ Boethius

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part. ~ John Irving

You have a teacher talking about his gayness. (The elementary school student) goes home then and says "Mom! What's gayness? We had a teacher talking about this today." The mother says "Well, that's when a man likes other men, and they don't like girls." The boy's eight. He's thinking, "Hmm. I don't like girls. I like boys. Maybe I'm gay." And you think, "Oh, that's, that's way out there. The kid isn't gonna think that." Are you kidding? That happens all the time. You don't think that this is intentional, the message that's being given to these kids? That's child abuse. ~ Michele Bachmann

His office was a spider's lair of silver thread and tempting promises, a page out of Power Architecture Magazine. The dean copied the design from President Lyndon Johnson's old senate office. The room narrowed toward his desk, an architectural device that channeled all eyes toward the dean, and his chair was slightly elevated, forcing visitors to look up. The two visitors' chairs were both lowered and oversized, making each guest feel like a child, swimming in too much chair. His architect had assured him it was a subliminal masterpiece. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

I was an only child, eventually. ~ Steven Wright

A mothers Love is as deep and powerful as any ocean, in the depths of it forgiveness forever is found for her wandering child. ~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. 'He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.'
Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product. ~ Tim Wu

That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It's getting late. The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. I ~ James Baldwin

The great question she raised involved me: is it worth while? I do not know, my ever greater calm replied, but it is so. There, before my silence, she surrendered to the process, & if she was asking me the great question, it had to go unanswered. She had to giver herself-for nothing. It had to be. And for nothing. She held back, unwilling to surrender. But I waited. I knew that we are that thing that must happen. I could be useful to her silence. And, dazed by misunderstanding, I could hear a heart beating inside me that was not mine. Before my fascinated eyes, like some emanation, she was being transformed into a child. ~ Clarice Lispector

He was out to get back everything he'd lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever. ~ Jack Kerouac

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. ~ John Steinbeck

The sight of a child ... will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons - longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona. ~ Carl Jung

I don't think anyone's found a way of eliminating thoughts of danger and loss. It's rather that, when they're unrealistic, you become an acrobat at marshaling evidence against them. ~ Martin Seligman

In the child, we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently. ~ Otto Ohlendorf

Reacher said, So here's the thing Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I'll take it off your wrist. ~ Lee Child