To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that...

Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

The American flag doesn’t give her glory on a peaceful, calm day. It’s when the winds pick up and become boisterous, do we see her strength. When she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed...

Lady Moon rose an’ gazed o’er my busted’n’beautsome Valleys with silv’ry’n’sorryin’ eyes, an’ the dingos mourned for the died uns.

For some reason, I thought Victor could heal that wound better than anyone else. It’s strange to think that this vampire, the embodiment of all my hatred, could act like a suture.

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn’t live for very long without...

Mourning is not forbidden, you know.

I thought maybe we mourned not only for the dead but also for the living. We felt their absence before we knew for sure they were gone.

Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn’t magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning.

You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.

People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance....

Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice…These are the indelible marks others make of us, like...

the evil thing is inside, not out.

Death never pierces the heart so much as when it takes someone we love; cleaving the heart they held with their passing.

The size and height of the tree determines how heavily the ground will shake when it falls. The cassava tree falls and not even the pests in the forest are aware. The baobab tree falls...

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

Throw off your grief,’ doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

O weep for Adonis – He is dead.” “Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep – he hath wakened from the dream of life

It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic – as if God no sooner saw...

Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing…

How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?

Rain is a lullaby heard through a thick, isolating blanket of clouds. It is the tinkling harp of water droplets; a moist breath whistling through willow reeds; a pattering beat background to the mourner’s melody....

The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by...

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain’s gonna go away?

Shall we mourn here deedless forever a shadow-folk mist-haunting dropping vain tears in the thankless sea

It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her at all the places where she was alive.

Don’t cry for the dead, for the dead is deaf, dumb, blind, lame, unemotional and dead.

I can’t shake you.

As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your...

I am very familiar with the sound of loss.

In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you’re inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space....

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool...

{Yogananda on the death of his dear friend, the eminent 20th century scientist, Luther Burbank}His heart was fathomlessly deep, long acquainted with humility, patience, sacrifice. His little home amid the roses was austerely simple; he...

Music, When Soft Voices DieMusic, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap’d for the...

There she comes” – and that is dying.

I could feel my insides sink. My knees too. So I sat on the ground, against the wall, letting it support me. I thought I knew what heartbreak felt like. I thought heartbreak was me,...

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...

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.

We never stopped being each other.

In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.

Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session...

I feel about my dogs now, and all the dogs I had prior to this, the way I feel about children—they are that important to me. When I have lost a dog I have gone...

For all her culture’s attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else’s body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart…she doesn’t want another body, she wants...

It was only in the middle—between the immense and the minute—that sadness seemed to exist.

I’m not a fool, I knew from the beginningwhat couldn’t happen. What couldn’t happendidn’t. The enterprise is abandoned.But half our life is dreams, delirium, everything that underliesthat feedsthat keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi-sanity,...

The dead,” she said. “And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you’d think they were corpses handing on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements.” …...

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it....

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the...