I am always saddened by the death of a good person. It is from this sadness that a feeling of gratitude emerges. I feel honored to have known them and blessed that their passing serves...

Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the...

grief is a housewhere the chairshave forgotten how to hold usthe mirrors how to reflect usthe walls how to contain usgrief is a house that disappearseach time someone knocks at the dooror rings the bella...

Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

Acknowledge that some moments are just plain awful―desperate and gloomy and painful and miserable and nothing at all but anguish. No truthful, cheerful thought in the world will fix it. So let me cry awhile....

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?

Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them....

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.

…And yet a knowledgeis here that tenses the throatas for song: the inheritanceof the ones, alive or oncealive, who stand behindthe ones I have imagined,who took into their mindsthe troubles of this place,blights of love...

everybody mourns in her own way.”Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars...

He felt the comfort of being part of an eternal cycle symbolized by the gold strips on either side of the black mourning band he wore. Light, dark, light. The dark was just an interval.

When my late father died — now I’m in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc.,...

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

The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.

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,...