I used to feel afraid of the future, always assuming the worst. But now I’ve realized that my worst fears have already happened, and I’ve survived them! I’ve walked into the fire and made it...

If she lives, she shall be my wedded wife. If she dies–mother, I can’t speak of what I shall feel if she dies.” His voice was choked in his throat.

I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a...

His departure gave Catherine the first experimental conviction that a loss may be sometimes a gain.

You shine brighter than the sun””But even the sun goes away every night””But it is hte sun’s absence that makes us feel its power. We know the loss, the beauty and the life that the...

That cake tasted good. But the cake in the garbage tasted better. It was the best cake I ever ate.

I suffer a loss and people console me. Royce suffers a loss and whole towns evacuate.

You were standing in the wake of devastation And you were waiting on the edge of the unknown And with the cataclysm raining down Insides crying “Save me now” You were there, impossibly alone

When nothing becomes the vocalThen nothing becomes the focalAnd nothing’s becoming at all

Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.

Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you’d been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was...

A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose.

I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them. This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her...

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of...

Loss taught me. It taught me that I won’t have people around me forever. The good I need to do to someone today, I may not have the opportunity to do tomorrow.

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of...

No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a...

If you want to find money, focus on people. If you want to lose people, focus on money.

She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.

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...

Sometimes the opposite of loss is loss.

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut…

And there was time enough–or so it seemed–for all the cherries atop all the ice-cream sundaes in all the world to fall from their frozen perches, as the heat of a treasure chest summer melted...

She was too quiet, or she was too loud. She took things too seriously, or not seriously at all. She was too sensitive, or too cold-hearted. She hated with every fiber of her being, or...

Bella: How could I live with myself when it’s my fault? None of you should be risking yourselves for me –Jasper: Bella, Bella, stop. You’re worrying all the wrong things, Bella. Trust me on this...

That what?” “That I knew i misjudged you. That you love him. I’m not saying In what way. Maybe you don’t know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him,”...

A person can’t possibly live without the one person that gave them life.

…and be emptied of gravity and surrounding by the rouge wave of an emotion she could not name.

You are my finest knight

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...

And she wept as well for the others lost in the Dark War, and she wept for her mother and the loss she had endured, and she wept for Emma and the Blackthorns, remembering how...

LamentFor JAmong the small graves a soft shaft of sunlight gently rainsOn a memory; etches, as a glittering finger,Golden corn field hair, ignites eyes sweet as the seas blue plains,Traces lips pink as Marys carnation...

I was physically attacked by a woman who didn’t even know me. Yes, my boyfriend was her former husband, but she tried to ruin me.

I ultimately decided to hold my tongue and settle instead for the comfort of ignorance. Not knowing the truth, I retained hope, and that hope I held like a smooth warm stone against my heart.

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...

All I can say is, it’s a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill...

The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had...

Losing is all that’s left, I say.- Losing is all we’ve got left to lose, you sayThe impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need...

A lifetime, one might say, of loss, but we here recognize something much different, more nuanced, more full of shadows. A lifetime of hope. And anyone who’s done both – hoped and lost – knows...

From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved...

When you lose someone who’s as close as your own skin, the only place you can find him again is hidden inside your memories.

It is okay to release your feelings when you feel the waves coming. It’s all part of the process of having to let go of your relationship with your loved one as you once knew...

We are meant to love. We are meant to lose. Love is our promise of a bittersweet end, and our desperate, hopeless struggle not to hurt anyone along the way.

And as all of us know, it does not matter if the ending has been predetermined, or the demise inevitable, or otherwise on time, or even long overdue. For those who love or even simply...

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...

We’re all bits that the war didn’t take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger’s back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who’d chewed their lives and spat the...

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done...

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...