There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.Some are long,some are short.Stay upright.Stay with life.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

There is nothing like feeling truly “awake” and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, “There is still so much to be done, and I will...

You’re not broken. You’re hurting.

How we take it for granted – those trivial conversations; those mundane moments that we think hold no meaning. We never realise how much we rely on the ordinariness of everyday life. When love is...

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the...

It’s funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.

Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.

You know, through pain, you learn a lot about yourself–things you thought you never knew you wanted to learn. And it’s kind of like those animals that regrow a part of their body–like a starfish....

Sometimes you hide away a memory because it is so precious that you don’t want to dilute it with the attempt to recount it.

We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or...

Ah, grief makes us precise!

Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.

Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful...

We talk about how he and Leanne are doing knowing full well there is no sufficient answer.p 294

But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.

I’ve seen too much sacrifice to believe that God is behind all of it, and I’ve seen sacrifice that has no indicia of the hand of God at all. Loss is not always part of...

Tonight I Can WriteTonight I can write the saddest lines.Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.Tonight I...

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning?

I don’t get as much fan mail as an actor or singer would, but when I get a letter 99% of the time it’s pointing out something that really had an impact. Like after ‘My...

It has taken me four years to figure this out.If we live long enough, we all will experience this.Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event...

It takes a strong woman to lose everything, then stand naked in front of the mirror and face herself again. You need time, honey. And I don’t mean time for it to go away. I...

You strive all through your life, to get somewhere, to be something, Some One, to matter, to have this, to have that, fill up your life with possessions, bonds, connections and in the end, the...

I was helpless in trying to return people’s kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that’s for sure. Cruelty isn’t that hard to understand. I had no trouble...

Grief was like a seizure that shook me like a storm.

For a double grief came upon them, and a groaning for the remembrance of things past

The cross, therefore, is always ready; it awaits you everywhere. No matter where you may go, you cannot escape it, for wherever you go you take yourself with you and shall always find yourself. Turn...

Sometimes it’s your fragrance that comes to me, out of the blue, on a crowded road in a Sunday afternoon.But more often, it’s memories of us that cross my mind almost every lone evening.All I...

Apart from my father, this house if filled with women. Women stop their lives; they’re programmed that way. A child comes into the world and suddenly the choices grow fewer. The women seem to understand...

You don’t understand,” Alecto replied vacantly. “It isn’t that I want to die… I just don’t want to exist.

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she...

Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft.

The heart aches in brokenness as daylight awakens the pain of knowing.

She’s dead, you stupid cat. She’s dead.

Rainbows introduce us to reflectionsof different beautiful possibilitiesso we never forget that pain and griefare not the final options in life.

In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5I sometimes hold it half a sinTo put in words the grief I feel;For words, like Nature, half revealAnd half conceal the Soul within.But, for the unquiet heart and brain,A use...

Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment...

I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the...

Jeanne’s sisters thought nothing of themselves…. Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper...

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into...

That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist...

I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don’t want you to think of me and feel sad.

It preoccupies me until it’s time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They’ve taken what’s on...

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure...

It’s funny how sometimes you don’t see the obvious things coming. You think you know what life has in store for you. You think you’re prepared. You think you can handle it. And then-boom, like...

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.