Best 173 quotes in «bereavement quotes» category

...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite part of the aging process and the human experience.

Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.

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 beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried.

We all need hope. As souls, we journey in physical bodies, traversing a life that is dually lived. We experience safety through attachment to the physical world, but we also are comforted and cared for by a trust in the non-physical, spiritual part of our reality. Two different roads, available for us and from which we choose, moment by moment.

We never truly "get over" a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it.

We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

When my grandfather died, we let the roof get a little grey and the two banyans in the backyard took each other in their arms and, weeping, filled with spider webs.

What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have “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 or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from the sky, and I take heart again, glad they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death…Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone on are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow on the joy of the departed…Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them.

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

What is hope? Like love, it is hard to define, but easy to recognize, a state of being that compels us to go on. It is a feeling that we have what we need to continue our journey to the next moment.

When I awoke on Wednesday afternoon, I understood how an amputee must feel.

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., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.

When we learn to attribute meaning to the events in our lives, we connect with our Higher Purpose, Higher Wisdom, or Source; we become Master of the Self. A gradual process, this is often tied to loss and to love.

You have to do what feels right for you. Do not let anyone influence you otherwise. It is your mind, your heart, and your own internal wisdom that will lead you in the direction you need to go.

When we understand the illusory nature of life and the profound power of eternal love, which enables us to create miracles and experience the presence of our deceased loved ones, we find ourselves living with joy, hope and peace.

Why do they lie?” she asked herself aloud. “They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse.

You need to keep hurting until you realise you never needed to hurt in the first place.

A break up is the closest thing to bereavement

All of our suffering in life is from saying we want one thing and doing another.

And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement, Yes, we will all go together when we go.

ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

A saved soul has many sorrows. They have their share of bereavements, deaths, disappointments , crosses. What shall enable a believer to bear all this? Nothing but the consolation there is in Christ.

Heaven is a place nearby, so there's no need to say goodbye.

Attachments and bereavements are inseparable.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

Heaven and God are best discerned through tears; scarcely perhaps are discerned at all without them. The constant association of prayer with the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death suffice to show this.

A thousand goodbyes come after death - the first six months of bereavement.

Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.

Grief is a process, not a state.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

How very softly you tiptoed into our world, almost silently, only a moment you stayed. But what an imprint your footsteps have left upon our hearts

It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. . . . Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.

I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.

I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.

It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.

Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps.

Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.

Not a sorrow, not a burden, not a temptation, not a bereavement, not a disappointment, not a care, not a groan or tear, but has its antidote in God's rich and inexhaustible resources.

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.