Best 520 quotes in «grieving quotes» category

{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss—perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they’d cherished together. She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They’d shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl.

She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.

...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.

She scanned the Starveil posts, her mood darkening. Spartan had been a part of her life since elementary school. Losing him felt like having a piece of herself torn away. No amount of fix-it fics or alternate universes could change the fact her one true character had died.

The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.

The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. “You might imagine I’m coping day by day,” she murmured. “But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

Some of the most challenging work a suicide survivor can do is to pray. To pray fully, survivors must bring all of themselves to the prayer: their anger, disappointment, fears, insecurities, and why's. I bring all of me into an encounter with God, aware that nothing in the human experience, or the human response to the ambushes of life, is alien to God.

Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead.

The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes. Breathing your air…. touching your skin… … Saying goodbye…. The last time I felt alive…. I was dying.

The morning after their deaths, Armand had gone into their room. The scent of them, the sense of them, almost too much to bear. The clothing. The book. The bookmark. The bedside clock, still ticking. He'd thought that strange. Surely it should have stopped.

The pain of your loss will return. Less, but still considerable. I know you've worked hard to release it, but it can still take hold of you. I will help you sing away the fury, but I will not bear it for you.

The only place I ever felt at home was with you. There isn’t a place for me anywhere anymore… I’ve been evicted.

The reason he could do none of the necessary things to take care of himself, on the few occasions when he thought of them, was that he was preoccupied elsewhere.

There are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind. I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored. I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now. And yet. And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone. And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.

The truth of it was he didn't want her. He wanted Mary Kate with every cell of his body. He missed everything about her. The feel of her sleeping at his side. Her gentle snores. Her soft brown curls tickling his nose enough to wake him from a sound sleep even on nights when he needed it most. Her smile. The smell of her. At odd moments he thought he had heard her laughter, or he'd catch a glimpse of her in the corner of an eye, but all of it was a lie, and every time it happened it was as if someone had ripped a deep wound in his chest. The pain was raw enough to make him want to take a razor to his wrist, but each time he considered acting upon the idea something stopped him, and so, he stumbled on barely alive and wishing for an end. At times he couldn't breathe, couldn't move without wanting to scream.

There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

There’s only ever been one person I’ve looked at and thought… ‘I could quite easily spend the entire rest of my life with that man’. And sooner or later I need to accept that he’s spending it with somebody else.

There would have been time for such a word. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.

The universe - fate - is cruel and random. Things happen for many reasons. Things happen for no reason. To shoulder the burden of the universe's caprice is too much for anyone. And it's not fair to you.

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

There will be a sea of tears, You'll gasp for your breath at times, You'll drag your heavy heart And drown your soul in the sea. But sooner or later, The sea will dry up, There won't be any savior ship But you'll learn to embrace The wet sand revealed.

…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you. Some people might find that strange. But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.

The train blows through town delivering reality, slapping my face and screaming, “You are alone” Rose colored memories drown, taking their last breath.

The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.

This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep your porch, go drink coffee in the shade of the trumpet vines. You have days where you want to lay down and die, but what you learn is this: As long as there's somebody left on this earth who loves you, it's reason enough to stay alive. You don't give in to your broke heart-- you just let the wide, cracked space fill up again.

...They all try to see more of her, but she hides herself away. It is not how Kitty would grieve. She, if she had to, would grieve wildly - with noise, mucus, paint on the canvas, blustery walks on beaches, curse words and exhausted sleep. But everyone grieves differently just as everyone loves in different ways.

They had become muffled and distant then anyway. This happened in those first days after the wave. I couldn't find their faces, they quivered as in a heat haze. Even in my stupor I knew that details of them were dropping away from me crumbs. Still, whenever they emerged, I panicked.

They say “Follow your heart”…. …. But I can’t follow you where you’re going…

Though I never really had you…. … to me you will always be the one that got away.

Though these words will never find you, I hope that you knew I was thinking of you today….. and that I was wishing you every happiness. Love Always, The girl you loved once.

Time heals nothing. It only brings other issues and tissues, and takes what is incurable or unacceptable out of the center of our attention.

Time is long, death is patient, and the ghosts will always outlive the grieving.

To ease a grieving heart is the world's greatest pleasure, more so, when the heart is yours.

We cry in our own rooms, remembering a man who will never be here again.The house creaks. Maybe it feels the weight of our grief, maybe the floorboards are buckling because the burden is too heavy.

What does it feel like, having a missing sister? I can tell you. You know how if you lose something valuable, a wallet or a piece of jewelry, you can’t concentrate on anything else? Well, it feels like that all the time, every day

When I could find something to laugh about for 30 minutes, my grief lightened just enough to make the day bearable.

When I was with him suddenly I wasn’t this broken person anymore. I was just me. I was whole again. I was just a person – like everyone else.

When someone is grieving, you don’t have to say anything. Just be present. Be nonjudgmental. Let them cry, scream, or sit in silence. You don't have to fix them.

When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief…. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance ….. What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.

Why write wrong if the writing won’t right the wrong? (90)

Witnessing a mother's slow physical decline can be the equivalent of of experiencing long-term trauma. The daughter's feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear persist. And persist. And persist. She may alternate between wanting to protect her mother and resenting her, an advance-and-retreat dance of identification and rejection than can span years.

With you in my life I felt like I could conquer anything. It was as if I was on top of the world and even the stars themselves were just within my grasp. But without you …. even getting through the day is hard.

You aren’t falling apart. You’re well beyond that. You’re just rattling along now. Elven dolls doing what little you can to gather the pieces as they fall away. But you don’t know how to properly reattach them—a doll does not repair itself. So you hug those brittle fragments to your chest until you simply cannot hug anymore. Until you’ve had to leave so many behind that you no longer remember what it is you’re missing.

You can miss places. You can miss people. Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back. They’re not the same. You’re not the same. The loss of them changed you.

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.

You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really FEEL the loss.