I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story...

When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris...

…because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre,...

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

that old irrepressible-impossible- hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds...

the heart aches through nights—the broken places of neglect

Utterly, irrevocably, lost

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?

People are going to say a lot of things. And some of it will be helpful, and some of it will be annoying, and lots of it will get on your nerves. But they’re saying...

Take solace in that, regardless of the fact that the love you had in your mind was lost, it was fairer than any, and you can take that with you forever.

To better handle grief, become the passenger, not the driver.

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain,...

I cannot talk of the power of want, of how much desire can do. I don’t think it can be measured. I think want is forgotten too quickly or dismissed as being worth far less...

I’ll remember you… I remember everyone I’ve lost.

People lose people, we lose things in our life as we’re constantly growing and changing. That’s what life is is change, and a lot of that is loss. It’s what you gain from that loss...

Those who have endured the scars of life, sorrows of the Heart, the grief of loss, pain of body, mind or spirit, and have fathomed the unexplainable sufferings of life have the greatest capacity to...

She’s not here,” I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. “She’s not here. You can hiss all you like. You won’t find Prim.” At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow...

Mary Joe Fernandez rarely has a bad loss. She never tries for stupid shots.

That loss is common would not makeMy own less bitter, rather more:Too common! Never morning woreTo evening, but some heart did break.

Papas should be loving their children so much that they cry when they gone. That’s what papas is supposed to do.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the...

I am very familiar with the sound of loss.

From loss breeds new life

When you don’t have something anymore, you learn to live without it.” That’s what my dad told me that first night after he found me sleeping inside a closet underneath a pile of my mom’s...

If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of...

…(my father) would say nothing,And I could not find a silenceAmong the one hundred Chinese silencesThat would fit the one he createdEven though I was the one Who had just made up the businessOf the...

my bones are heavy” i would only mean itas a good thingheavy bones can’t be broken,you can’t break heavy bones

We don’t lose people, they just slip down like sand through the loop holes we have in ourselves.

lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands...

I am ashes where once I was fire…

It’s been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn’t sneakily turned up the heating.

The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past...

There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.

Everything assumes a different intensity when you are feeling the pain of loss. Be prepared. A minor annoyance that you might once have managed with a shrug now becomes a nuclear crisis! You are no...

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.

For death is the only certain thing in life,and despite this cliché being an absolute truth, with only the timing varying from one person to another, we never seem to be prepared for it. It...

He entered the city asked a blind man if he had ever heard the name Enkidu, and the old man shrugged and shook his head, then turned away, as if to say, ‘It is impossible...

We all handle loss in our individual ways, grieve in all kinds of ways. We all go through feeling okay sometimes, but other times, we feel so bad we hurt ourselves or those around us.

It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her tastebuds. Without him life was so dark, and all...

I guess this was what it felt like to love someone and feel like you had lost them. Even when you were still holding them in your arms.

Repression. Her therapist, Dr. Solomon, loved the word. He’d say it slowly, letting it roll off his tongue. Sometimes he’d add a chin stroke for good measure. He always looked pleased when he did this,...

Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in...

I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I...

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a...

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.

When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

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...

But these clouds won’t leaveWalk awayBarely breathingAs I’m lying on the floorTake my heartAs you’re leavingI don’t need it anymore

Loss taught me about the frailty and transient nature of man. It taught me humility. It taught me about the urgency of service, of touching lives, of mentoring, of legacy. Of making hay while there...