If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again...

For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible...

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,...

Regardless of what you’ve been through we all process energy differently.

I knew I was being an idiot. But I figured if I kept being an idiot, if I didn’t actually accept the truth, then the truth would become false.

I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn’t feel ashamed.

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut…

And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your souls means that you are still alive, still human, and still...

A lot of people who read my novel ‘Smog City’ ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it’s because I’ve given them life. Not literally of...

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother’s death was part of God’s plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times— his plan is to kill us...

As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit...

When a small group of people come together to relive the Salem witch hunts, God cries. For if anything is sorrowful to God, it is evil done in his name. When you find out you...

It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt.”We stay in the silence and the loneliness of the otherwise empty dormitory for a few more minutes,...

Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

She takes another sip of her drink. She looks around the bar. I look at the fine muscles in her neck, at the two points of her clavicle. Her grief has not so much changed...

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people’s grief, by packaging it for TVspecials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain...

The pain of your loss will return. Less, but still considerable. I know you’ve worked hard to release it, but it can still take hold of you. I will help you sing away the fury,...

Grief is one illness that defies all remedies; it must ever run its course.

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there...

I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn’t believe the...

You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.

Every night. Every day…

Her only weapons were her tears.

Where are you?” I wheeze into the floor. “Where did you go?

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around...

Learning to live again wholeheartedly includes letting love flow freely in and out of your heart.

Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.

Imagine going a long time without seeing someone you love. Then after months or years getting the moment to see them and catch up. I think that’s what death is like. Going a long time...

…you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you...

But it turns out Joy is a house built from the same bricks as Sorrow. Pleasure is a poem, and it uses the same words as Pain.

I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it.” But she’s crying herself now. “He’d be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did...

It…whatever ‘it’ is, has swallowed me and I lie here in the pit of its cold dark stomach being eaten alive by its bile and I…I don’t even know if I want to be saved.

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all...

How we respond to grief can shape our present

Even as she listened to murmurs of support, she heard the relief in other people’s voices, the immense gratitude that it wasn’t their child who had died. She heard I’m so sorry until she despised...

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can’t someone be healed by happiness?

And even if Amina didn’t yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for...

I often wondered after David’s death: Had they known something then? Did their very souls recognize each other? Did Jacob, closer to God than anyone else I knew, somehow sense this was the last time...

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and...

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...

He may even find it as amusant as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the...

The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love.

She’d not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that...

EnragedI throw myself to the ground and I scream,my best friend is gone, this world is so mean.I cry as I pound my fists on his grass,I’m very upset that our time went so fast.My...