For me, adoption was grief in reverse.

Come, my child,” I said, trying to lead her away. “Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries.””Good-bye, poor hare!” Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we...

The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see–the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there...

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her,...

I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They’ll be undiluted and words won’t work. We’re all going to get hit and won’t know how to hit back. I wish I...

… Now to die of griefwould mean, I’m afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. …

Death. What a brief word for the extinguishing of life. To be no more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again……….anything.

We don’t get to choose the things that happen to us in life. What we can choose is how to react to them, how we deal with them, and how we move on.

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.

You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”I had had no answer for her then. Now I might...

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to...

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.

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs

It could be the sound of each name he knows/curling to ash in his chest’s aortic furnace one after another, year after year instructing him/in the patient work of letting go. Even still/there are things...

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the...

Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out–anger is momentarily easier to cope with.

She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great...

Rejection is one of the worse forms of pain. Loss is the worst. Grief haunts until you allow yourself to move on.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, Die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft.(Jealousy is a grievous passion that jealously seeks what causes grief.)

She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

He missed him like he would miss the sun if it fell out of the sky.

One of the things I get a lot of grief on is the amount of money I spend on planning, … In the long run, it’s money well spent.

Grief causes suffering and disease.

The singers make much of kings who valiantly die in battle, but your life is worth more than a sword. To me at least, who gave it to you.

Mothering while grieving should involve being understanding and keeping a gentle attitude toward yourself as you work to balance your own needs and your child’s. You become stronger by remaining aware of your own well-being,...

Everyone has always said I look like Bailey, but I don’t.I have grey eyes to her green,an oval face to her heart-shaped one,I’m shorter, scrawnier, paler, flatter, plainer, tamer.All we shared is a madhouse of...

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.