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.

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, “Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends”(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds,...

Grief can be an incredible source of energy. For good.

Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn’t matter how small or insignificant it is…or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that’s what I see when I look back at...

But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body...

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.Think rather,–call to thought, if now you grieve a little,The days when we had...

Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate.

Secret, smug believers! God never gives youmore than you can bear, they like to say, as ifthe strong should be punished for their strength:We can bear it. So we got it.But what about my baby?...

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took...

Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.

I had had my night of weeping…I had purged myself of useless emotions that terrible night, now every nerve every sinew, every thought was bent on a single purpose

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the...

[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in...

Time takes away the grief of men.

He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so...

I am convinced it is, then our churches are filled with believers who are hurting, to one degree or another, whether visible or unseen. Some come every Sunday clinging to a thread of hope that...

In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read...

You go to bed different… tossing and turning is the norm… you wake to a sunny day but clouds follow you wherever you go. You wonder if you are strong enough to climb out of...

I wished for someone to hold me up. Suddenly someone was there.

I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov’s firstsentence I knew it wasn’t the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common...

I hope that I get to see you love what you are. To know yourself as gift and worth and truth. That you see what a huge thing it is to have the courage to...

Humans have a sense of spontaneity and emotion. We have a dichotomy between grief and happiness.

The more you want to dig a hole and burry yourself in it, the more you need to run and be ALIVE and do things. The more you want to do nothing, the more you...

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were...

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool...

Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers...

What if it’s as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I’d kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I’d...

One of the worst things about burying a child is the stress of wondering.

And on the days I couldn’t breathe, I learned to paint air.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.

However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It’s only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

In order to heal, you have to first be broken.

He’d passed the longest night of his life locked in mortal combat with his ghosts, calling up and then disavowing twenty years of memories. He would banish that bitch from his heart if it meant...