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...

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel...

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and...

Sometime when I cry I’m not sure if it’s grief or relief.

A funeral is no place for secrets.

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Faris turned on him. “Why choose to wear black today, of all days? I know why I’m in black. Why are you? Mourning?He looked startled. “One does not wear mourning for a servant.”You still don’t...

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will...

… he wasn’t crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

…what happens when you returnand find nothingbut a hollowed shell,shingles and floor,walls and echoesand the light that lead you herehas now burned outand the ones who built ithave traveled afarand you cant go to them,no...

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us...

I never dreamed that I’d meet somebody like you.And I never dreamed that I’d lose somebody like you.No, I don’t want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)No, I don’t...

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if...

Imagine going a long time without seeing someone you love. Then after months or years getting the moment to see them and catch up. I think that’s what death is like. Going a long time...

Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.

…gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

You are alone”Rose colored memories drown,taking their last breath.

But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

I miss you so much in these wee morning hours,when the depth of the night sets my spirit free.When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the worldbut the beauty...

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...

There need not be a purpose to a person’s death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was...

How can I grieve what is still in motion?” I ask her. “Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding,” I say. “It´s Normandy out there.

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free....

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.

He was like the other half of myself,’ says Boris…Ulrich says, ‘You haven’t lost {him}, you know. I don’t know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know...

You aren’t falling apart. You’re well beyond that. You’re just rattling along now. Elven dolls doing what little you can to gather the pieces as they fall away. But you don’t know how to properly...

And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as...

I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone’s fickle brain . . .

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.

He was a son of the revolutionary movement when he and the revolutionary movement were still pristine. It was a special time for Filipino activists—a time when a hundred flowers bloomed and a thousand thoughts...

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.

Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living.

Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want...

I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of...

Looking back, my greatest regret is not that I didn’t love them enough (to the brink of insanity and back again), but that I couldn’t save them from themselves.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in...

…she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk’s bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs,...

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

Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this...

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

A dog’s good for filling a grief-dug hole.””In the Shape of Shep

…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...

It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It...

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity–he might be there, that place she didn’t think to look, hadn’t worked...

For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a...