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...

Golden bars make no less a prisonthan a coffin on a hill.And in caged reformation,one wanders aimless still.The rafters now a recollectionof sacred suppression.How the morning dawnstrikes mourning confession.Now Death yields a harvestof the living...

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it...

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

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…?

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory – or in the memory – of the...

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body!

What is it like when you lose someone you love?” Jane asked. “You die, too. And you wait around for your body to catch up.

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space–atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from...

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...

At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.

You can’t love your mother or father if you don’t also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

10 second heartbreak.” That’s the time it takes to wake to full consciousness each day and remember…

Los ojos se me llenaron de lágrimas. El dolor del duelo es como un invitado borracho, cuando parece que se ha marchado, vuelve a darte un último abrazo.

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.

Afghan GirlIce blue eyes that look to the morning sky as I knit the pieces and remnants of my life. I have No books, no paper, no pencils, and no black boards. I look at...

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely...

If you think about someone you’ve loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

Some grief shows much of love,But much of grief shows still some want of wit.

The light in that room was a glow; I seem to remember the color green, or perhaps flowers. A pale green sheet covered his inert body but not his head, which lay (eyes closed, mouth...

Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it’s burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of...

It’s all rather political, mourning is.

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

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.