Death Grief Quotes

We don't have to meet people where they are, we just have to love them where they are to find any sort of peace. This is something I learned from being my mother's child. ~ Jodi Livon

I miss you with the very edge of my skin.
It winces in absence,
a giant muscle contracting. ~ Valentina Cano

Once very near the end I said, 'If you can
if it is allowed
come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits. ~ C.S. Lewis

I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone,
I feel I am alone.
I check'd him while he spoke; yet, could he speak,
Alas! I would not check.
For reasons not to love him once I sought,
And wearied all my thought
To vex myself and him: I now would give
My love could he but live
Who lately lived for me, and, when he found
'Twas vain, in holy ground
He hid his face amid the shades of death.
I waste for him my breath
Who wasted his for me! but mine returns,
And this lorn bosom burns
With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,
And waking me to weep
Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years
Wept he as bitter tears.
Merciful God! such was his latest prayer,
These may she never share.
Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold,
Than daisies in the mould,
Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,
His name and life's brief date.
Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er you be,
And oh! pray too for me! ~ Walter Savage Landor

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace ~ Jill Telford

Didn't anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people - perhaps many people - to death, grief, torment? ~ Greg Bear

Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a post-mortem dissection of all the perceived flaws the celebrity had. ~ Jennifer Armintrout

What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. ~ Elaine Pagels

Jesus might not think so, but maybe the dead are best left that way. ~ Chris Scofield

Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in the end?
The bottom line is, it's my fault. I didn't love her enough. I didn't do enough. I wasn't enough. There's no excuse. There is nothing that will ever make that okay. ~ Hannah Harrington

The heart aches in brokenness as daylight awakens the pain of knowing. ~ Phindiwe Nkosi

When all you have left of the people you love are things, then the things become really important. ~ J.W. Lynne

Can you remember another time when your chest felt like this?"
My fingers splayed across my aching chest as I carefully pondered her
question. Then I nodded vigorously as I remembered. Tears streamed down my cheeks unchecked as I whispered hoarsely, "Yes, I do remember.After my husband died, it hurt like this. My chest felt full and heavy, and I thought then, Oh, this is what it feels like to have your heart break. ~ Mary Potter Kenyon

The line between the living and the dead may not be much of a line at all, but the terrain is not for the weak of heart. ~ Shannon Huffman Polson

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

Death is an asshole. Regardless of illness or circumstance or gut feelings, you are never ready to accept never seeing someone again, to have nothing left but last conversations and memories. You are never ready to be left with how sick somebody looked, or the way they stood up and hugged you despite how dizzy and feverish they were. You are never ready to exist without a person you loved and still need. Death is a constant, but you are never ready…

But while it's scary and awful and exhausting and terrible, it's also comforting to have accepted that death will always be there and will always rip out your heart. It doesn't get easy, and it will find surprising new ways of debilitating you. But what does get simpler is your awareness of it – the reminder that you have gotten through it before, and you will get through it again, and it will never, ever be as bad as it is in the moment you are battling through. It will never hurt the way it did when you found out, and the ache will never be as painful as when you realize those were your last words to them. It won't be as painful forever…

So, no, we can't control death. But we can control how we breathe, how we act, the type of work we do. We can control what we say yes or no to, control who we choose to surround ourselves with, control the way we make the people we love feel. We can decide to be kind, to try our best, and to be honest. Those are the things that outlive us. When we're faced with the harshnes ~ Anne T. Donahue

Grief," she writes, is "a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly." - Sandberg sharing Anna Quindlen's take on how society conceals grief ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die
My skin is in blazing furore
I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick
I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha
Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon
In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain
The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted
I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex
I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace
Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart
Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness
other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton
I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass
But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well
I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss
I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse
In to the sun-coloured bladder
I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me
I'll destroy and shatter everything
draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger
Shubha will have to be given
Oh Malay
Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today
But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self
My power of recollection is withering away
Let me ascend alone toward death
I haven't had to learn copulation and dying
I haven't had to learn the responsibility of sheddi ~ Malay Roychoudhury

Grief is like the ocean. The waves ebb and flow. Sometimes the water is calm. Other times it's turbulent. In order to survive, I had to learn to swim. In moments when I struggled with massive waves of grief, I rode it out. ~ Dana Arcuri

Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…"
"The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, "the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won't ever see her grow up. She'll have to do it without whatever I could have given her."
"Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It's so important to us because we see it so close. We're individuals, we're full of ourselves, and so we're bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there's so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we'd always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there's so much to feel and I'm greedy? ~ Wallace Stegner

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

You haven't lost Iraki, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.
'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.
'There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You'll see visions of him wherever you go. You'll see his eyes so moist, his intentions so blinding, you'll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.
'Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.
'In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.' ~ Rana Dasgupta

They possessed a peaceful relic to set their child free, and the simulacrum they had fed would fade away. ~ Laura Gentile

I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage, with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes.
Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poets. ~ Anna Hope

Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away. ~ Julian Barnes

Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves ... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers ...
Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. ~ Allegra Goodman

I woke up to an ache in my chest, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of the ghost making a racket in the kitchen. Now, I'm not the sort to dwell on doom and sorrow. Life is too short for that. But I should at least try to describe the ache briefly: It is not the kind that comes from eating tacos too late at night. It's the kind that comes from being left behind. I think my heart is smart enough to know there's a place I should be filling with new memories, new jokes, and wondrous adventures with the one person I loved most of all. But that person is gone now. And so, my heart has a giant hole. I call it The Big Empty. ~ Natalie Lloyd

Death had marked his family with unbreakable black halos, until only two remained. ~ R.W. Patterson

When he left us, he stole all the words. ~ Alex George

Sweetheart, I'm telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn't matter if you had thirty years," she tells me. "It wouldn't be enough. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead ... but you know what? It wouldn't change anything. All I can do now that they're dead is to go through the actions of living without really living, and hope it improves someday. ~ Rebecca McNutt

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning? ~ Julian Barnes

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"
"No, Matthew. What do they say?"
"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king. ~ Neil Gaiman

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

When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient. ~ Stieg Larsson

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor--from breast to knees--
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. ~ C.S. Lewis

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

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.
STATE OF WONDER ~ Ann Patchett

I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister's and my own, and, damn, I'd better live well. ~ Nina Sankovitch

Grief, he said, is carnivorous. ~ Dennis Lehane

Sometimes my grief feels as though I've been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I'm colliding into a wall that won't give. There's no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again. ~ Michelle Zauner

Grief is like cancer. It ebbs and flows within you. Then, it changes and transforms you. Forever. Grief. Cancer. Both force you to face your worst fear - death. Grief and cancer. Both undermine your optimism of life. You finally see the cup is really just half full, even if you believed otherwise your whole life. Both teach you to believe that bad things can happen to people, whether they're good or bad or rich or poor or young or old, alike. Grief and cancer corner the market for all. Grief and cancer take all comers. Both rule. Do they always win? I begin to wonder. ~ Katherine Owen

And if one day,' she said, really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud. ~ Patrick Ness

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever. ~ Emily Rapp

He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he'd learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn't brave enough to enter. ~ Lauren DeStefano

And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event, which would be so anti-climatic, so undramatic (a sudden violent seizure in his long abused heart, a quick massive flooding of the brain) it would go unnoticed. It was the small deaths occurring over an entire lifetime that took the greater toll. ~ Paule Marshall

I wonder where it all comes from--this need to go to the place where the body has been laid to rest. It's the need to reconfirm how precious someone was and how irreplaceable, and the desire to reconnect with them on a different plane. ~ Takashi Hiraide

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What. ~ John Green

Thanks," Johann finally said. "It's the irony of war. Those who want to live, die. Those who want to die, live on. ~ Lee Strauss

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

Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world. ~ Edwidge Danticat

But his grief, the gaping hole left after my mother died- it's too close to my own. Seeing his grief, year after year, it only magnifies my own. My Mother was the glue that held us all together. Now, with her missing, there are only people in pain, unable to heal each other. ~ Ruth Ware

She was gone but it seemed she was still always there, right at the center. ~ Georgia Blain

And this evening when I close my eyes against the darkness and think about her, I'll imagine iridescent wings fluttering, if only for a moment, against cloudless blue skies. ~ Nancy Stephan

Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God's suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

You will live in me always. Your words, your heart, your soul are all part of me. My heart is full of your memories. Thank you for the gift of your life. I will never forget you. ~ Amy Eldon

Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I had hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back... Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, the time has come. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.
And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him
a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.
And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you. ~ Philip K. Dick

It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire ~ David Nicholls

After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin ... The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don't know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers. ~ Mark Doty

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

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps. ~ Hart Crane

I look up, and Jackson's eyes find mine. For a second, it almost feels like we're about to race into the hole to join you. Being buried alive has got to be better than whatever comes next. ~ Adam Silvera

... the poetic moment is a static one. It's watching through a window while the action happens elsewhere. And then the poet turns away from the window because the poem is done ... It cannot unflinchingly stare grief down. At some point, by necessity, or design, it must turn away. ~ Helen Humphreys

Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone. So it is with all the memories of him. They all lead into blackness. All I can do is remember him, I cannot experience him. Nothing new can happen between us. ~ Nicholas Wolterstorff

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

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end. ~ Gavin Maxwell

We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It's fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes us. ~ Mira Ptacin

I used to want to be a cop for a brief time, a detective, solving crimes and upholding the law, ever since I stated watching crime shows in junior high. But being a cop, contrary to what many believe, isn't like the films or television shows that we see every day. If you're the cop who has to have the grim duty of telling a parent that their child was killed, or who loses their friend on a dangerous case, or who has to interview victims of horrible crimes, somehow I imagine that you just want to quit forever on some days. ~ Rebecca McNutt

When someone you love ... when they die, you want it undone. You'd do anything to have them back, and it's easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be fine. And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do. ~ Elizabeth Scott

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary. ~ Michelle Zauner

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more. ~ Marcel Proust

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

We should be sure that in our pursuit of happiness and positivity, we do not lose our ability to experience the other side of life, as well. Feelings of grief and respect for the departed, are honourable thoughts to have and honourable feelings to feel. In seeking happiness, we must not be so afraid of sorrow, that we lose the ability to cope with it properly. There is a healthy way to cope with both sorrow and joy; both need to be looked straight in the face, in the eyes. ~ C. JoyBell C.

...although being "angry at God"--or at myself, or him, or anyone else--made no sense to me, I was often overwhelmed by sudden, intense bursts of anger that had no outlet, no appropriate target. ~ Elaine Pagels

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

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today. ~ Richard Adams

Sam was your brother, and Trick was your friend, but what they did had nothing to do with you. You don't have to choose. Just because me and your dad couldn't live together, didn't mean you had to stop loving one of us, did it? Doesn't work like that. Love doesn't work like that. ~ C.J. Flood

If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die. ~ Kenneth L. Patton

In Siena, where more than half the inhabitants died of the plague, work was abandoned on the great cathedral, planned to be the largest in the world, and never resumed, owing to loss of workers and master masons and "the melancholy and grief" of the survivors. The cathedral's truncated transept still stands in permanent witness to the sweep of death's scythe. Agnolo di Tura, a chronicler of Siena, recorded the fear of contagion that froze every other instinct. 'Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another,' he wrote, 'for this plague seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.… And I, Angolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands, and so did many others likewise. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere.
The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: "It isn't the museum, it should be."
The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

the mind is a treasure
trove, an almanac, a tomb. ~ Beth Morey

All my life I'd been a believing Christian ... But that instant in the ER
the instant Annette [his wife] died
I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.
As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn't created us in His image; maybe we'd created god in our image. ~ William M. Bass

I realized that whilst crying over the loss, the living did not seem adequate because they were not my loved one. The room full of strangers hurt me profusely. Even as I saw thousands of young people; I felt incomplete and more saddened because the one I wanted to see was buried. ~ Phindiwe Nkosi

...The fact is that Dale and Grady had made a pact long before they ever came into this earthly existence. This is why so often there is one physical death that follows another. They are from the same soul family. They are so intertwined that they need to leave together. They are all returning home together. ~ Kate McGahan

Not yet," he wailed, as raw as the earth. "But you lay as though already dead, and I cannot go on without you. Do not leave me; do not die!" And I felt a grief from him to melt the mountain ice. Grief to drown in. Grief to both rend my heart and mend it at once. ~ Tosca Lee

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Pressing my head to his heart, I listened hard, straining to hear any gurgle or murmur of life. Hearing nothing, I felt the shock settle into my mind, slowing it down and then turning it off.
"Don't leave me, Noah. Please, don't go," I whispered into the darkness as the light spray of rain touched my face.
If only I could turn back time.
I would tell him yes. ~ Karen Ann Hopkins

So you see, the grief doesn't get smaller - life just gets bigger ~ Lucie Brownlee

And can it be that in a world so full and busy the loss of one creature makes a void so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of eternity can fill it up! ~ Charles Dickens

Will you not weep?"
"I do not have the time for tears. ~ George R.R. Martin

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

Grief grinds slowly; it devours all the time it needs. ~ Long Litt Woon

There was something about other people's grief that was so exposing, so personal, that she felt she shouldn't be looking. ~ Jane Fallon

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