Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?

I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe.

I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I’d be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came...

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason...

My life is now divided into two periods: With June and After June. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of it.

I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow.

I began to recognize that there was a part of me that was stronger than I ever could have imagined. I didn’t know how I was still standing. I surprised myself. I was waking up...

When my grandpa died, I had this same fear. I love Grandpa so much. He was Mom’s dad, and he was my favorite person in the whole world. He lived up north, between Grayling and...

Life has a way of filling up one’s time with many different things to do. So much so that you turn a blind eye to the things that really matter.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years...

Mad – empty – crazy – lost – dying… I was all of these things and nothing as well, because even though I breathed and moved, I was not alive.

We do not have control over many thingsin life and deathbut we do have controlover the meaning we give it.

He’d wanted to – he didn’t know. Break bottles. Break windows, crash cars. Burn down the world. Find solace at the bottom of countless more bottles of wine, this time consumed in solitude. In the...

It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would’ve never known if I hadn’t gone to the bathroom...

The great love is gone. There are still little loves – friend to friend, brother to sister, student to teacher. Will you deny yourself comfort at the hearthfire of a cottage because you may no...

There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.

One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line – gather, fall, slide…gather, fall, slide…each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy....

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

There are some griefs so loudThey could bring down the sky,And there are griefs so stillNone knows how deep they lie,Endured, never expended.There are old griefs so proudThey never speak a word;They never can be...

I was raised to believe that God speaks in the language of sacrifice,” he told me, “You are expected to sacrifice because it is the measure of the depth of your belief…

I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a...

The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.

In some aspects losing a child is like a wall, but instead of getting over it, you must carry the wall with you, wherever you go, for as long as you live.The wall is immovable.You...

I can’t stop thinking about what he felt like against my body, against my lips. I can’t remember anything else, anything before that. And I realize in this moment that I’ve finally done it. That...

good monster” the notmuch (a childlike mania). Now the two of them play, they’re cheeky and brave together, Leo now answers his mother: Notmuch. The notmuch is half memory of Fips, the other half is...

Life Lesson 3: You can’t rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around — beds, pillows, arms, laps.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.

She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? … It was both small and bright, and she wanted to be in a very small, very bright place. Small enough to...

Let it rain on some days,Let yourself shiver on some cold nights, So when it’s Spring you’ll know why it was all worth going through.

Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)

I’ll remember you… I remember everyone I’ve lost.

Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of...

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.

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...

The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where...

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…