The sounds of a man crying is a piteous noise, almost worse than an infant’s cry. Babies are either hungry, sick or bored, or need changing. This man was none of those things. He was...

People come and go from our lives all the time. It’s not our fault that people leave. The Universe is just making room for new people with new lessons.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Monday, June 9: People think they know you. They think they know how you’re handling a situation. But the truth is no one knows. No one knows what happens after you leave them, when you’re...

For grief has always been so dear to you that you would make me writhing in pain in the brothel of your imaginations than to be playing with a bunch of balloons in the yard...

But Balthamos couldn’t tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn’t keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or...

We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was...

At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by...

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots.

I have discovered that sitting still leaves little spaces for the grief to get in, so I stay busy.

I will not speak falsely and say to you: ‘Do not grieve for me when I go.’ I have loved my children and tried to be a good mother and it is right that my...

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another....

The ocean-blue bowl won’t refuse to bruise, won’t hold it back from the gaping earth-wounds.There will still come water, chill wind and happy goosebumps, and in the utmost corners of oaks, leaves laughing.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.

He actually did it, didn’t he?” Marsh said, shaking his head in wonder. “That bastard. There are two things I’ll never forgive him for. The first is for stealing my dream of overthrowing the Final...

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

You can’t tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.He wasn’t even sixteen but his coffin’s the same size as a man’s would be.It’s not just that he was young, but because it...

You endure what is supposedly unbearable, and before you know it, you would have done the impossible by bearing the unbearable.

I always thought of grief as a blow that took everything out of you. And it is like that. But it stays, past that first hard hit. It stays and blows its breath into you....

Kate lost a mother,” I said, “but I lost a nothing.”Kate doesn’t feel that way,” Jack assured me.But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when...

lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands...

A whole Gothic world had come to grief…there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled…

All the tears in the world can’t bring back the dead or wash away your fears and grief. I want you to put up your chin and tell yourself you are strong. And if you...

In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you’re inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space....

Just when normal life felt almost possible – when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing...

She closes her eyes, and I can see the moisture. She’s deep-breathing again, and I notice her hands are clutched around the opposing wrists, nails digging in deep, hard, scratching. Pain to replace pain.

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was...

A win is a win, but the game sure was ugly. Good grief, we hit just six of 37 shots. Neither team could get into the flow of their offense because of turnovers and fouls....

[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.

Grief does not change you it reveals you, Hazel.

What happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there’s nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how...

A grief travels with us as far as we carry it.

Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in...

You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that’s the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous.

WHAT THE LIVING DO Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled upwaiting for the...

No point carrying useless ballast. It won’t change a thing.

Ten years, she’s dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn...

…it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together…

Your whole world ceases to exist and you’re nothing but a shell of a person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it her way, me in mine, and you in yours,” he said,...

Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what...

Cooper’s tremendous love and energy and unchained freedom had captured life itself. Now, as the last shovelful covered him forever, I knew I would always carry a big piece of Cooper Half Malamute with me...

He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because...

I transform “Work” in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real “Work” – of writing.) for: the “Work” by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love,...

Grief is a room without doors – but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in.

She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.