Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

I am a wife, mother, and friend, and soon to be grandmother, I still feel, understand, and am worthy of the love and joy in those relationships. I am still an active participant in society. My brain no longer works well, but I use my ears for unconditional listening, my shoulders for crying on, and my arms for hugging others with dementia. Through an early stage support group...by talking to you today, I am helping others with dementia live better with dementia. I am not someone dying. I am someone living with Alzheimer's. I want to do that as well as I possibly can.

I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

I am convinced it is, then our churches are filled with believers who are hurting, to one degree or another, whether visible or unseen. Some come every Sunday clinging to a thread of hope that somehow the church will be the body of Christ that supports them, offers a word of hope, and helps them find a way to walk through the storm with God instead of without God.

I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life

I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.

I am homesick for the time when my heart was whole

I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.

I ... am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.

I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.

I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone’s fickle brain . . .

I am not sad anymore. I am not weak or tender or quiet like you remember because the second you said those words and closed that door, I sold my soul to the part of myself I had buried in order to love you, to let you touch every inch of my rotten body, for I wanted to be touchable and not so strange. Not so sad and tender, like I’ve always been, they say, so I changed. And then your glances and words throwing knives with no return about my change of habits and ways of living, being, and I nodded and smiled, dying silently a little bit inside.

I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.

I am them. And they are me. All of us, we are each other. There is no such thing as good-bye.

I am the most important person to me. I am the most important person in the entire universe to me. I am the centre of my own universe.

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.

I am vulnerability under scarred skin. Numbness crawling behind wine soaked lips. A cocoon of grief battling a chest full of hushed breaths, longing to escape the mod-podge of memories, that journal where I've been. Layer after layer they are sealed upon my person, encapsulating time in a vessel that has sailed one too many shores.

I ask you, what would you do if you could erase one bad memory and retain all that was beautiful in your life? Would you not move heaven and earth - and get loads of therapy - to have that?

I become almost wild and shout at them: - To whom are you reciting Kaddish? Do you still believe? And what do you believe, whom are you thinking? Are you thanking the Lord for his mercy and taking away our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers? No, no! It is not true; there is no God. If there were a God, he would not allow such misfortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, or killed, by people who want only to to honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed! and you, living witnesses of the great misfortune, remain thankful. Whom are you thanking?

I began praying for the health and safety of my boys before each one was born. Once a week for two years prior to Joseph’s death, I also gathered with other moms to pray for my sons and their schools, and I specifically asked God to protect the health and safety of Joseph, Curt, and Wyatt. My prayers were not answered the way I had hoped. Despite countless prayers for Joseph to be safe, God said no. His plan remains a mystery. I have had to accept that mystery and trust Him in the dark.

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force that has not power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

I believe I gather strength from the generations of women who came before me - that together we all hold the suffering of the world.

I began realizing it was okay to just sit with Him instead of always reading and journaling prayers or hustling off to the next bible study. It was okay to just be still. It was possible to find Him in the immense stillness, the hidden parts of my heart. He was always there in my hiddenness.

I began to feel that nature itself was nurturing me, reminding me that life still offered beauty and calm, and that I was also made out of these elements.

I began an expedition called Grief. An alternate route along my sacred wandering. A detour with tears and troubles. On this voyage, I sensed God warning me, “Buckle up! It's going to be a bumpy ride.

I began to recognize that there was a part of me that was stronger than I ever could have imagined. I didn't know how I was still standing. I surprised myself. I was waking up to the fact that I was in charge of my own life and it was my choice whether to sink or float.

I believe there is no heaven or hell. There are no devils or angels. No afterlife or salvation. My soul won't be incarnated or lost in the oblivion. One day, I will just stop existing... and that's it!

I believe that sometimes, the moment you say goodbye could be as painful as a lifetime worth of pain that you can experience while living with the memories of your loved ones. I couldn’t stop myself from hallucinating about all those things that could have happened, while you were walking away from me today. I stopped walking and turned my head, expecting for you to do the same. I stayed there, motionless, and waited – for you to turn once, to smile, or wave. But you didn’t. You just continued walking away from me, while I stayed there watching your silhouette becoming smaller, and smaller with time, until it disappeared completely. There was nothing else to wait. “What happened?” she asked me when I turned my head again towards the platform. “She let me go, finally,” was all I could say.

I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex.

I can tell you that it's okay to feel whatever it is you're feeling right now. It's okay to miss him and it's okay to hurt and it's okay to feel lost-just as long as you come to me, or your friends, or your family, when all those feelings try to overwhelm you. Because in amongst all those feelings, some of you are going to be angry, and some of you will need someone to blame. It's okay to be angry. I can't tell you if it's right or wrong to feel blame, but what I can say is don't be angry for too long and don't hold on to the blame forever. That kind of anger can take away a piece of you, a piece of you that you might not get back.

I can hear Isaac's smile. It softens his words, but they have a different meaning now. Between his mouth and my ears, they pass through everything that has happened since.

I cannot help but come to believe, there should be a disclaimer for the soul upon entering this life stating: This will destroy you but it is not the end. Every immortal thing must die once to learn that it is immortal. One life ends but another begins.

I can’t shake you.

Ice upon ice, and yet, inside, she melted and mourned all the same.

I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there.

I can't stand on my own in a world where you don't exist.

I can't stop thinking about what he felt like against my body, against my lips. I can't remember anything else, anything before that. And I realize in this moment that I've finally done it. That horrible, awful thing I swore I would never do. The frosting. The cigarettes. The blue glass triangle. The shooting stars. The taste of his mouth on mine in the hall closet. Gone. All I can think about is Sam. Matt is – erased. My whole body is warm and buzzing. Sam is smiling next to me, because of me. And I've never felt so lonely in all my life.

I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.

I could never imagine loving myself I could never imagine a person behind the image I saw when I looked into the mirror. Who is this person? I would wonder Who is she? Does she have a name?

I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour's peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people, should be alive, when you--

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

I can’t help you, I can only guide you, and you are the one who can help yourself.

I can't take this pain away for her. I can't make it better. It's all I want to do - make it better - make her feel better, but I understand grief. It's a bitch. Grief has to work itself out. It can either consume you or you can move on and at this point it's consuming her.

I closed my eyes, feeling a point of infinite love and infinite grief, and comfort in knowing, for the first time, that I have infinite space inside for both.

I couldn’t even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita’s sadness.

I could not wail. Must I? Do I need to pretend? Please! Will somebody understand? Can you detach me from tradition? Please leave me alone.

I cry out and there is a dull nothing.

Icy fingers walked down my spine, and I realized I was trembling. I wanted this to stop. Wanted Jas to stop before he made this whole situation a million times worse, but I couldn’t speak.

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.

I’d give in to the grief but make sure I wasn’t loud enough to draw attention from those who think words will make me feel better.

I didn’t love you to seek revenge. I didn’t love you out of loneliness or unhappiness. I didn’t love you for any of the misguided reasons that time might convince you I did. I just loved you because you’re you.