He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

There is the scent too. Wonder follows it; wonder about how a boy can smell like that when he probably has no idea. He smells like the woods in the winter or the rain when...

Mark Spitz didn’t ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all....

I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

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....

You can’t love your mother or father if you don’t also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.

It is okay to release your feelings when you feel the waves coming. It’s all part of the process of having to let go of your relationship with your loved one as you once knew...

I respect the hell out of her for how hard she’s working to be okay. I just wish she’d let me show her how to let go, how to let herself hurt. I want to...

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

And I can’t be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

I’ve never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it’s like an animal. She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. She’s whimpering. She’s sluggish. She’s not herself

April 11, 2004Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behavior in these circumstances? It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out...

I love the friendly faces of old sorrows;I have no secrets that they do not know.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like...

ABBA: The Movie; I got a lot of grief for working on that.

Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings.

It’s always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation….Why do men behave the way they do, warring?””What do you think?”...

I have done it,” she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S,...

Samo si mene imao, osim onih grobova kod kuće, sad više nikog nemamo ni ti ni ja, ti si mene izgubio prije nego ja tebe, ili možda nisi, možda si mislio da stojim pred ovom...

There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you...

For me, adoption was grief in reverse.

Come, my child,” I said, trying to lead her away. “Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries.””Good-bye, poor hare!” Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we...

The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see–the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there...

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her,...

I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They’ll be undiluted and words won’t work. We’re all going to get hit and won’t know how to hit back. I wish I...

… Now to die of griefwould mean, I’m afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. …

Death. What a brief word for the extinguishing of life. To be no more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again……….anything.

We don’t get to choose the things that happen to us in life. What we can choose is how to react to them, how we deal with them, and how we move on.

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.

You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”I had had no answer for her then. Now I might...

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to...

Your lingering presence erodes me. Heartbeat by heartbeat. Cell by aging cell. Washing away any sense of self I ever had. Intruding into a nothingness I’ve struggled to find the pieces to fill. A jar...

An observant friend will recognize the signs of the rise of grief: eyes that easily well with tears, a smile that is difficult to sustain, a tendency to withdraw. And ultimately, perhaps we each need...

He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days.

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…

The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

My dad died, I write. almost a year ago. Car accident. My hand is shaking; my eyes sting and fill. I add Not his fault before pushing the notebook and pen back across the table,...

The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn’t appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer...

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs

It could be the sound of each name he knows/curling to ash in his chest’s aortic furnace one after another, year after year instructing him/in the patient work of letting go. Even still/there are things...

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the...

Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out–anger is momentarily easier to cope with.

She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great...

Rejection is one of the worse forms of pain. Loss is the worst. Grief haunts until you allow yourself to move on.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, Die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft.(Jealousy is a grievous passion that jealously seeks what causes grief.)