There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart,I didn’t know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for meto do, there alighted the fear, haunting me...

And then I feel guilty, because I know all these offers are made in vain. I know I cannot get my mother back healthy for a day. … My mom is sick, sick and dying,...

Mandy would much rather have imaginary friends who were real than real friends who were imaginary.

I know already that I can survive it. That’s the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I’ll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the...

O, that this too too solid flesh would meltThaw and resolve itself into a dew!Or that the Everlasting had not fix’dHis canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,Seem to me all...

I had met death before, in different forms–I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would...

What this country needs… what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain – something terrible...

And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too...

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me...

She should have died on that day. Perhaps, in a way, she had.

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to...

‘I think that’s why his asking me to pull the plug hurt so much. He kept saying if I really loved him, I should have been able to do it. And I thought, if he...

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.

Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious; holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time.

What’s even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you’re diseased or something.

Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him....

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

The point is to turn your grief into love. The roses are helping you find grace.

Everybody dies, and everybody loses people they love-everybody-and that is not an excuse for you to fucking die. I love you, and I need you to be my mother, and I need you to have...

Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn’t count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he’d see that there’s enough of both lots for him.

It is true that the grief journey is very lonely, but it is also up to you to decide just how lonely you will make it.

The women cried with one another, and it didn’t seem to matter whether you were Jewish or Christian, you just mourned.

I don’t believe time heals. I don’t want it to. If I heal, doesn’t that mean I’ve accepted the world without her?

Adam’s lips are set in a grime line. I can’t tell if he’s about to cry or about to punch the guard. For his sake, I hope it’s the former. For you own, I hope...

It kind of scares me though, to keep wearing it every day like I do. What happens when I run out of it? Will I forget what she looked like? What it looked like when...

don’t tell me not to drink. not to smoke. not to grieve. if i speak of these things it’s because i have to— but i am not speaking to you.

Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I,...

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It’s hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had...

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have...

Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning...

That evening I sat across from Jeremy Bulloch and Jacob at the dinner table. I watched as Jeremy, who seemed to speak Jacob’s silent language fluently, drummed his fingers up and down on the edge...

The aftermath of someone’s death is vertiginous, a murky, shimmering mass; to look at it head-on is to see only the fog of emotion. One must approach it sideways, entering it by way of an...

I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked …and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been...

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless...

…a passing face together with his grief turned you into a weeping Madonna…

There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world...

When words can’t make it better, hold my hand and don’t let go.

… being with people who don’t understand is worse than being alone with her grief.

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

MOTHER – By Ted KooserMid April already, and the wild plumsbloom at the roadside, a lacy whiteagainst the exuberant, jubilant greenof new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,only...

…People are not one-dimensional. People do not live on one plane…

Part of dealing with the sense of being cut off – for both the one dying and the one bereaved – is acknowledging that though a vital part of life has changed dramatically, all relationships...

What if you wake up one fine morning only to realize that the life you have been living since the last few days was nothing but a dream of yours?Would you go back to sleep...

I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her...