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’ve never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it’s like an animal. She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. She’s whimpering. She’s sluggish. She’s not herself

April 11, 2004Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behavior in these circumstances? It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out...

I love the friendly faces of old sorrows;I have no secrets that they do not know.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like...

ABBA: The Movie; I got a lot of grief for working on that.

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...

I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.””Were you always?””What are you, a psychiatrist?”Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him,...

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust...

The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by...

True regret is knowing you missed your only opportunity to be simply a good friend to someone that was exactly like you.

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.

Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.

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.