Tears aren’t for the people we’ve lost. They’re for us. So we can remember, and celebrate, and miss them, and feel human.

…(my father) would say nothing,And I could not find a silenceAmong the one hundred Chinese silencesThat would fit the one he createdEven though I was the one Who had just made up the businessOf the...

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that...

It’s better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won’t get...

We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world–the company of those who have known suffering.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands,

June is gone. For the first time, the enormity of that hits me. Every muscle aches, my heart most of all. I am throbbing with how much I miss her. It hurts worse than anything....

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in...

It’s my own deep-rooted feeling that our souls never truly die and that life continues in some way. I know I need to have patience as my beliefs continue to evolve with my personal growth....

Yes, it will.

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it – assassin grief, he’d once...

Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground – I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an...

Gifts of grace come to all of us. But we must be ready to see and willing to receive these gifts. It will require a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of believing that, however painful...

(…) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water’s death was Augustus Water.

He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief’s tears on your face.

Unexpressed grief leaves the deepest scars.

Sometimes there aren’t words, Benny knew. Sometimes there are hurts so deep that they exist in a country that has no spoken language, a place where all landscapes are blighted and no sun ever shines....

But I understood, now, that we don’t live only for ourselves. We’re connected by millions of shared experiences and dreams and nightmares, all tied together with compassion. I learned that even when we’re going through...

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.

The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn’t get past something like that, you got through it.

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...

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...

Maybe heartache was more normal than the absence of it.

that old irrepressible-impossible- hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds...

You said move on, where do I go?

When you go through a breakup, it feels likesomeone died. And the truth is that someone has died – the relationship.

May the beauty of the flowers remind us of the beauty of our loved one’s spirit

And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be...

Yes. No. It’s hard to get over someone like that. She had a huge effect on me, both good and bad. That’s hard to move past. I try not to think about her much in...

…she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk’s bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs,...

As I lay in my bed unable to sleep I challenged Him: Pull out another miracle. Send him back. You can do that. You’re God. At that point in my grief, I envisioned how utterly...

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

There are as many sorrows as there are people who feel them and there are no rules…It is solitary… Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you – others may...

There are some who would vow that life isn’t fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It’s true,...

Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels….

Funerals seem less about comforting the souls of these dearly departed than aboutcomforting the people they leave behind.

What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first. They don’t know how we’re getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so...

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.

…there was something in the texture of the weave that felt happy: theecho of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, aburst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and...

Forgive my grief for one removedThy creature whom I found so fairI trust he lives in Thee and thereI find him worthier to be loved.

560My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent)...

The world believes it was built by love but reading Shah Jahan’s own words on the Taj, one could say it was grief that built the Taj Mahal and it was sorrow that saw it...

As Luke knelt down beside his corpse, Clary couldn’t help but remember what he had said about having loved Valentine once, about having been his closest friend. Luke, she thought with a pang. Surely he...

…gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

Nothing stood between Sheryl’s heart and skin. She was whole in her sorrow, perfectly connected inside and out, soul and body united, swaying with complete abandon to a dirge that only she could hear.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid....

You can never recover from losing a person you love, but you can find a way to let it be part of your life rather than letting it take over every part of you