I am convinced it is, then our churches are filled with believers who are hurting, to one degree or another, whether visible or unseen. Some come every Sunday clinging to a thread of hope that...

In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read...

You go to bed different… tossing and turning is the norm… you wake to a sunny day but clouds follow you wherever you go. You wonder if you are strong enough to climb out of...

I wished for someone to hold me up. Suddenly someone was there.

I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov’s firstsentence I knew it wasn’t the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common...

I hope that I get to see you love what you are. To know yourself as gift and worth and truth. That you see what a huge thing it is to have the courage to...

Humans have a sense of spontaneity and emotion. We have a dichotomy between grief and happiness.

The more you want to dig a hole and burry yourself in it, the more you need to run and be ALIVE and do things. The more you want to do nothing, the more you...

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were...

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool...

Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers...

What if it’s as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I’d kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I’d...

One of the worst things about burying a child is the stress of wondering.

And on the days I couldn’t breathe, I learned to paint air.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.

However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It’s only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

In order to heal, you have to first be broken.

He’d passed the longest night of his life locked in mortal combat with his ghosts, calling up and then disavowing twenty years of memories. He would banish that bitch from his heart if it meant...

In writing, I’m totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through everypainful...

I don’t say goodbye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily.Goodbye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.

I began praying for the health and safety of my boys before each one was born. Once a week for two years prior to Joseph’s death, I also gathered with other moms to pray for...

She’d felt more pain from Nico in their brief connection than she had from her entire legion during the battle against the giant Polybotes.

Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

There is a phantom that flies with the banshees. It strangles the throat, pierces the heart and consumes the body with pain that only time and tears can expel.

‘The grief didn’t fade, but it changed into something I could carry around with me, a noose I wore around my neck. It wasn’t until I saw you that the knot loosened.’

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, “Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends”(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds,...

Grief can be an incredible source of energy. For good.

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

The grief of children was unconditional, fueled by the implicit belief that it would last forever; for a child, grief was not grief unless it was eternal.

The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn’t recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in...

Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you...

…this woman, moved by some private sorrow as much as the words being spoken, cried almost silently, unobserved by others, apart from Mma Ramotswe, who stretched out her hand and laid it on her shoulder....

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

At Abraham’s burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of...

She pulls her hand away and Damian feels the sensation of falling, a somersault into a foreign abyss where a girl with eggplant hair and a hoop in her brow waits in the darkness.

Change the way you think and you will change the way you feel.

Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you’d haunt me.

Grief doesn’t have a face.

Listen, Harper. I realize how hard this is for you.”A flash of anger heats up in my chest. She doesn’t understand. She can’t. If she did, she’d leave me alone instead of trying to force...

The role of Cherishing in Bereavement – I think that the key to healthy grieving is to cherish those who have passed on, so that you celebrate their lives and the times you did have...

A feeling of pleasure or solace can be so hard to find when you are in the depths of your grief. Sometimes it’s the little things that help get you through the day. You may...

I don’t even know how long she sobs. Time ceases to pass, and she cries, cries, cries. Clutches me and makes these sounds of a soul being ripped in two, the grief so long denied...