Whatever he goes through, I feel. Whatever I go through, he feels. It’s what happens when two people become one: they no longer only share love. They also share all of the pain, heartache, sorrow,...

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.

Sometimes I am all right. Is this what they call letting go? I have let go, if letting go means I am all right sometimes.

This heart is a hurricane, turbulent with ache screaming winds of grief waiting to make the skyfall, to pluck the cloudsfrom their beds with itswhipping winds

Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We’re fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more....

When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief’, we listen, for that...

Remember to view yourself and your humanness with a kind heart.

When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don’t try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not...

I’m in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I’ve been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the...

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.What are brief? today and tomorrow.What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.What are deep? the ocean and truth.

What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.

Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.

Jeeter?” Grace whispered into her walkie-talkie. “Are you awake?” She waited.A few weeks ago, she and Jeeter had started chatting on their walkie-talkies late at night when she couldn’t sleep. He always answered her call...

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn’t...

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam...

It was her way of dealing with the grief. She was really venting when I was just sobbing.

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal...

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification...

So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far away.Bearing up, then, must be this: the...

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I’m not certain of anything anymore. I don’t know what will happen–

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses....

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it....

The sun still, surprisingly, came up and shone down onto the cold, metal leftovers. No loud noises. No screams. No breaking glass. Just silence and sunshine. You would be forgiven for thinking that this all...

We cried. The bones and dust of our fathers cried with us.

Nothing in this world compares to the comfort and security of having someone just hold your hand.

The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this...

Zhuangzi’s wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. “You lived with her, she brought up your children and...

Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.

Why write wrong if the writing won’t right the wrong? (90)

Grief is a good thing. It’s the way we get through the transitions of life.

All my life I’d been a believing Christian. … But that instant in the ER–the instant Annette [his wife] died–I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.As I thought more about it in the...

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead… but you know what? It wouldn’t change anything. All I can do now that...

Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living.

Her free hand was clenched in a fist. I held still, waiting for her to say something, to tell me she should have never left me here, where her friends might look to me for...

In the libraryI search for a good book.We have many books,says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,and ALL of them are good.Of course she says that. It’s her job.But do I want to read about TrucksTrains and...

Weeping is terrible for the complexion,’ said Leonie, holding Shayndel close, ‘but it is very good for the heart.

Tears of grief are unique. They contain chemicals that aren’t found in the more mundane droplets of moisture that bathe the eyes, as if our tears wash us free of some noxious cause of sorrow....

In our culture I think most people think of grief as sadness, and that’s certainly part of it, a large part of it, but there’s also this thorniness, these edges that come out.

…y vi, mientras Samuel daba el atrevido paso de besar a Lindsey delante de toda la familia, que emprendían por fin el vuelo, alejándose de mi muerte.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

I wish I believed him. He’s looking at me like he can see where I begin.

The adult world that runs our school considers this a teachable moment (a new phrase for our era) where children will learn to process loss and grief and loneliness by sitting in the football bleachers...

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.