May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done...

Though I knew in my mind that others had felt such loss, this loss was mine, and I felt that no one would ever understand it, and to try to explain the lonliness and pain...

Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of...

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but...

With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can’t explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here...

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d...

I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I...

An English teacher at school once said to her, ‘Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.’ Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the...

It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I...

Grief is a stern teacher, but I am confident I could not have learned some lessons in any other way. For that, I am grateful. Grateful to God for loving me enough to stretch me...

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and...

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the...

He may even find it as amusant as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the...

The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love.

She’d not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that...

EnragedI throw myself to the ground and I scream,my best friend is gone, this world is so mean.I cry as I pound my fists on his grass,I’m very upset that our time went so fast.My...

There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure—the lunge of a curse, a shared...

My experience is that God will meet us anywhere. Grieving badly and under the covers? He’s there. Sitting at the cemetery, wishing it were you? You’re not alone. Sitting on your child’s bedroom floor still...

The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow...

Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.

You think when someone you love passes away, everything becomes clearer, that your priorities and perspectives align in a way they’ve never aligned before because of the sobriety of it all. But it doesn’t. Those...

But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

Grief is love turned into an eternal missing

The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was...

for my grief’s so greatThat no supporter but the huge firm earthCan hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.(Constance, from King John, Act III, scene...

I’m happy for Tyson. I’m sure a good amount of grief he’s gone through has been self-imposed. He’s kind of tortured himself for some of the games he hasn’t played well in. He’s really broke...

She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?”I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears...

Rainbows introduce us to reflectionsof different beautiful possibilitiesso we never forget that pain and griefare not the final options in life.

In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5I sometimes hold it half a sinTo put in words the grief I feel;For words, like Nature, half revealAnd half conceal the Soul within.But, for the unquiet heart and brain,A use...

Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment...

I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the...

Jeanne’s sisters thought nothing of themselves…. Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper...

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into...

That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist...

I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don’t want you to think of me and feel sad.

It preoccupies me until it’s time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They’ve taken what’s on...

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure...

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.Some are long,some are short.Stay upright.Stay with life.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

There is nothing like feeling truly “awake” and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, “There is still so much to be done, and I will...

You’re not broken. You’re hurting.

How we take it for granted – those trivial conversations; those mundane moments that we think hold no meaning. We never realise how much we rely on the ordinariness of everyday life. When love is...

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the...