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.

This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Don’t mire up in self despair of your losses, learn from them and move on to other good things in life. Don’t stop allowing the sunshine in because of the fear that winter will come...

Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good...

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it…I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away.

Grief. This is what it does to people. It makes them strangers to themselves.

When you don’t have something anymore, you learn to live without it.” That’s what my dad told me that first night after he found me sleeping inside a closet underneath a pile of my mom’s...

I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to...

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 don’t really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful...

I smile when I want to cry. I laugh when I want to die.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It...

…when the pain subsides the grief remains.

Gonzo’s father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true...

It didn’t help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn’t see her. An unseen mother couldn’t go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing...

Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It’s not like in the comics…I think you need to. Feel it…It’s not going to make a neat little hole. First – it’ll obliterate...

I have a RAGING SEA inside of me, trying to break free from ALL of me.

Most of us go through this journey of grief at different speeds

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at...

It’s not the weight you carrybut how you carry it -books, bricks, grief -it’s all in the wayyou embrace it, balance it, carry itwhen you cannot, and would not,put it down.”So I went practicing.Have you...

I forgot all about Christmas dinner,” I finally admitted. No one batted an eye.

You are a most effective killer, Michel. Is it true you wept like a child when they killed your sister? That you cried out in agony as if the sword had pierced your own heart?...

My mind couldn’t fit itself around the shape of his absence.

All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one’s soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is...

It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you’ve accepted that someone is out of your life, that you’ve grieved and it’s over, and then bam. One little thing, and you feel like...

That was when they noticed that every musician on the stage was wearing mourning black. That was when they shut up. And when the conductor raised his arms, it was not a symphony that filled...

Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.

The list of lifesavers left him numb, clueless – the action, indifferent.

Baby, don’t build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn’t have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it’s over? The future you dreamed is...

When my mother died, I thought I’d drown in sorrow. But my grandmother said something very wise, and I’ve always held it close to my heart. She said that not even the sea is infinite,...

Music, When Soft Voices DieMusic, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap’d for the...

Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. You follow it a far as you can go.But finally,the grief goes away and...