Coping With Death And Loss Quotes

Dr. R scratches out a note on his pad.
"Losing you both was only the practice pain, wasn't it? For my mum and dad ... "
He puts his finger on his lips, his elbow at his chest, not racked with cancer. "Yes."
"And when that happens, this will seem like nothing."
He nods.
"When it happens," he asks me, "what will get you through?"
"Friends who love me."
"And if your friends weren't there?"
"Music through headphones."
"And if the music stopped?"
"A sermon by Rabbi Wolpe."
"If there was no religion?"
"The mountains and the sky."
"If you leave California?"
"Numbered streets to keep me walking."
"If New York falls into the ocean?"
Your voice in my head. ~ Emma Forrest

Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing. She imagined herself standing over a grave with a shovel and hacking away at the soil. ~ Laura Van Den Berg

Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge
dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be. ~ Mark Helprin

If you love somebody deeply and you lose that relationship - whether through death, rejection or separation - you will feel pain. That pain is called grief. Grief is a normal emotional reaction to any significant loss, whether a loved one, a job or a limb. There's no way to avoid or get rid of it - it's just there. And, once accepted, it will pass in its own time.
Unfortunately, many of us refuse to accept grief. We will do anything rather than feel it. We may bury ourselves in work, drink heavily, throw ourselves into a new relationship 'on the rebound' or numb ourselves with prescribed medications. But no matter how hard we try to push grief away, deep down inside it's still there. And eventually it will be back.
It's like holding a football underwater. As long as you keep holding it down, it stays beneath the surface. But eventually your arm gets tired and the moment you release your grip, the ball leaps straight up out of the water. ~ Russ Harris

Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. ~ C.S. Lewis

Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind - this is what I call being whole in power. ~ Zhuangzi

We are far betting dealing with the big losses-death, divorce, debt, and debilitating illness-than with the daily onslaught of little losses. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Amid this constant physical presence of fellow human beings, we gaze inward, trying to absorb what has happened with our lives and why the person we love the most is not here. ~ Linda Collins

I want to talk with you today about a subject that touches every one of us. Loss. Sometimes we are faced with things we think we just can't handle...
The death of a loved one, a father, a child, and we strive to find the reason behind it all.
And when those reasons don't make sence, we question God.
We look up and we say, "God, how could You do this to us? "How can You put so much on our plate?" But we're not operating on God's timetable, are we? We don't understand God's plan. How can we? And let me tell you, this is where faith comes in. Faith can help us see His message in our own lives. Perhaps this loss is there to teach us not to take the ones we love for granted, to cherish the simple, mundane moments, to love others as fiercely and as bravely and as compassionately as we can. And in that love, human love, forgiving, relentless, unconditional love, you'll find peace. ~ Chaplain Orlovsky

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure. ~ Mark Doty

The fighting was horrendous. Bloodshed and death lie everywhere around us. It was not exciting, Vindhya. It is fearsome, and we were all scared out of our wits. There is no honour in battle but to protect you, my love. We have won the gates of Grilsom and lost the fortress of Loare...but we've gained allies from the Knights of Scrivehrim, and enemies of the dark elves of Scryire. There is no winning in War, my sweet...only loss. People die on
every side. How can any battle be won with such consequence and loss? I do not understand war. It's so unfair, so...unjustified.

We take innocent lives, yet we gain medals of highest honour and divine, sacred blessings. What is the sense of it? And even much less do I understand Andsar's concept of celibacy in soldiers, and that they choose to stay alone their entire lives. I might understand, were the reasoning that we would leave no one behind to suffer...but there is no reason for it. They tell us we are wrong to love one another, and so they justify our love by sending me to my assured death. If anyone were to find out about us, we'd both surely be killed. Love like this, though…I believe it is worth the cost of my life, if I could only be with you one moment. ~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Depression is a death within, a knowledge - terrifying - that you cannot resurrect yourself. Depression is loss of the vision that lets leaves breathe and fall, that lets the air smell of seed and soil. And there must be rage, yes I think there is rage toward such a severing, such a ragged-deep rupture with the world. ~ Lauren Slater

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes. ~ Joan Didion

I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there. ~ Richard Wagner

For death is the only certain thing in life,and despite this cliché being an absolute truth, with only the timing varying from one person to another, we never seem to be prepared for it. It is regarded as an end, as final and as negative, not as the metamorphosis it might be– the release of a spirit from physical to energy form, not unlike a caterpillar turning into a butterfly and experiencing new found freedom from the limitation of eternal crawling in search of sustenance. ~ Daniela I. Norris

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

They think I'm not dealing with my grief, but I simply refuse to give them the satisfaction of seeing it. I won't let them console me and feel like they've played their part well and done all they could do. I will not let them make today about them, and I refuse to make today about me.
Today is about him. ~ Cheyenne Berandi

Yes, genuine pain and loss coexisted with the deliverance, but it did not have the last word. Its power to hurt him was weakened because he could see the bigger things God was doing in, for, and through him. You can probably find similar events in your life. Hard things persisted, there was no apparent deliverance, but, with closer inspection, you notice a deliverance that went much deeper. And these are eleventh-hour deliverances on this side of death and eternity. Imagine if you gradually developed the spiritual skill to see beyond the immediate moment and catch a glimpse of the glories to come. The basic outline is clear: if you have thrown your lot in with Jesus, everything he has is yours, even the kingdom itself. It would be impossible to ask for more. Those who imitate Abraham's faith are always pushing the last minute farther out until it comes even after physical death. Such a person is fearless. A ~ Edward T. Welch

Mary and I have spent quite a bit of time with the Master. I saw him teach, I saw him heal, I saw him dine with his disciples, I saw him leave, and I saw him return. And this is what I think: I believe every moment of his entire life has been spent setting an example. Every breath, every act, every word, carries message upon message upon message. His every instant was meant to bring eternity into the moment and hope to this fallen world. The death of my brother, our time of broken mourning, our loss of hope . . . ~ Janette Oke

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. ~ Matthew Sanford

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
(Epitaph for Joy Davidman) ~ C.S. Lewis

He could tell Fleming he was a musician but he could not communicate what the music said to him or said to the people he played it for. The music told itself, it made some obscure connection for which there were no words. The music was its own story, but a man could dip into the vast reservoir of folk and blues lines and phrases and images and construct his own story: though upon performing it and without it losing any relevance to his own life it now belonged to the audience as well. It was something he could not fathom. The old songs with juryrigged verses like bodies cobbled up out of bones from a thousand skeletons. Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left. Songs that treated the most desperate of loss with a dark sardonic humour. "I'm going where the climate suits my clothes", the song said, not saying the frustration and despair that created it, saying that in the sheer lonesomeness of the sound, in the old man's driving banjo. There was an eerie timelessness about it that said it could have been written a thousand years ago, or it could have been an unfinished song about events that had not yet played themselves out. ~ William Gay

Some part of me ... had been waiting, since Kelp's death, for certainty that God ... was either dead or malicious. On the cot, now, in the rain-shadowed room with the medicine smells, I knew it was worse than that. They were a challenge, a dare: you must look at the horrors of the world and find a way back to faith in spite of what you saw. I had a glimpse of what the purer version of myself might be capable of: enduring the loss, keeping the rage and disgust down, finding meaning through suffering. But it was only a glimpse. There was so much shame, and the shame made me angry at the thought of getting better. ~ Glen Duncan

You don't have control" she spat. "Iris doesn't have control. No one does. Control is an illusion. Terrible things happen with no reason at all. Terrible, ugly, fucked-up things like rape and death and loss, and there is no power, no control. There's just the big, mean universe scraping your insides out and tossing them in the trash and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it ~ Kristen Mae

While he can interact with others who have no idea that anything is wrong, Ron lives without spontaneity, going through the motions, doing what he thinks people expect him to do, glad that he is able to at least appear normal throughout the day and maintain a job. He studied drama briefly while in college, and remains enamored of Shakespeare and literature, but an emerging self-consciousness eventually robbed him of his ability to act. Now he feels as if all of his life is an act - just an attempt to maintain the status quo.

Recalling literature he once loved, he sometimes pictures himself as Camus's Meursault, in The Stranger: an emotionless character who plods through life in a meaningless universe with apathy and indifference. He's tired of living
this way but terrified of death. ~ Daphne Simeon

Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will. ~ Coleman Dowell

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one's final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or "It's O.K." or "I'm sorry" or "I love you."

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system's expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what's most important to them ~ Atul Gawande

If grief kills us not, we kill it. Not that I cease to grieve; for each hour, revealing to me how excelling and matchless the being was, who once was mine, but renews the pang with which I deplore my alien state upon earth. But such is God's will; I am doomed to a divided existence, and I submit. Meanwhile I am human; and human affections are the native, luxuriant growth of a heart, whose weakness it is, too eagerly, and too fondly, to seek objects on whom to expend its yearning. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Defeating the enemy through deception with little loss of life is better than fighting face-to-face with the loss of many lives on both sides. ~ Aleksandra Layland

Where do we enroll in Life 101? Where are the classes dealing with the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship? Unfortunately, those lessons are mostly learned through trial by fire and the school of hard knocks. ~ Les Brown

I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition. ~ Rosie Thomas

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him ~ Jane Goldman

Mary remained weeping for her friend Jesus who had been all the world to her, and whose death ad meant the loss of that world. With great courage to be alone, and great courage to love despite devastating loss, she struggled to carry on, hoping to find and rebury Jesus' missing body. Suddenly Jesus stood before her alive again, calling her name. She turned, reaching, and said "Rabbouni!" "Noli me tangere," he replied- "don't touch me." If the courage to be alone requires also the courage to love, the courage to love still does not overcome loneliness. ~ Robert Cummings Neville

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

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

My point here is that the grieving are very dangerous, Richard said. They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner.

Okay, said Clare.

They are deranged, he continued. They shouldn't be let out of the house. Immediately after the funeral some sort of waiting period should be instituted, a period of confinement. It is a matter of public safety. ~ Laura Van Den Berg

I don't know how to speak anymore. And with whom?

I never found a soulmate. No one was a dream. They left me with open dreams, with my central wound wide open, with my heart torn. I mourn myself; this is my right. And yet I look down on those who take no interest in me. My only desire has been.

I will not say it. Even I, or especially I, betray myself. Like a nursing boy, my soul has been soothed. I don't know how to speak anymore. I can't speak anymore. I have taken apart, what they never gave me, which was all I had. And it is death again. It closes in on me, it is my only horizon. No one resembles my dream. I have felt love and they mistreated it, yes, me, I who never loved. The deepest love will disappear forever. What can we love that isn't a shadow? The sacred dreams of childhood have already died, and with them, those of nature, which loved me. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik