Grief Quotes - Page 29

When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient.

She walked down the lawn and surveyed the world as they'd both seen it--the wild limbs of the leaning apple tree, the golden-brown evening sky, the black silhouettes of the mountains. The trunk and the branches of the tree had bent over the years, under the weight of the heavy fruit. One of the biggest branches had grown down from the canopy of the leaves, all the way to the ground and straight along the grass...the end of that same branch had begun growing up again, at a right angle, the wood bending toward the sky.

It's funny how sometimes you don't see the obvious things coming. You think you know what life has in store for you. You think you're prepared. You think you can handle it. And then-boom, like a thunderclap-something comes at you out of nowhere and catches you off guard.

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.

Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.

I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing.

Have you ever walked along a beach? You walk towards something in the distance. For the longest while it never seems to get any closer even though you are walking and walking. Then all of a sudden, you are there. You’ve arrived at last. That's what grief is like. Meanwhile we are running with you in the spray of the surf at the edge of the shore where the sand meets the sea. We are cheering you on.

The times might be unpleasant, repulsive. The ghastly chaos, the abhorrent uncivility might be intolerable, might force us into argument or leave us panic-stricken.On such occasions people build within themselves a conviction, that the world outside is diabolical. The whimsical insults test our level of endurance causing us to plead for mercy, wanting us to be pitied than exploited and victimized. Often this grief and shame form a delusion within us that there no longer exists good in this world, that good people are fictitious and that goodness has lost its definition altogether. But such is not true because there are still people who are virtuous, unselfish, willing to help and possessing the ability of restoring our faith in humanity, to disregard them, their presence would be as heinous as the deeds of the people who are unlike them. The times might be unpleasant, repulsive but we’ll come out it, unharmed and liberated.

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves,and for one another. We need each other to survive.I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close,even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Lookfor them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.

They say that animals are incapable of feelings and reasoning. This is false. No living thing on earth is void of either. They also say that man is the most intelligent — and the most superior — species on earth. This is also false. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It has been shown that both rats and monkeys learn from making errors, yet we have not. Our history proves this. All creatures on earth have the capacity to love and grieve the same way we do. No life on the planet is more deserving than another. Those who think so, are the true savages.

Grief lets you indulge in it, so that it can feed itself.

On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it--that disgusts me

Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.

I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

When people told me I was so strong for surviving my daughter’s death, I wanted to scream. But the truth is that deep inside we are far more resilient, brave, and incredibly strong for having survived at all. So scream, be brave, and embrace your power. It will become your biggest asset.

Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.

Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken funerals in his stride—And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my handAnd tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my handIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

Around them, the dawn gently wakes Borg like someone breathing into the ear of someone they love. With sun and promises. Tickling light falls over warm duvets, like the smell of freshly brewed coffee and toasted bread. It shouldn't be doing this. It's the wrong day to be beautiful, but the dawn doesn't care.

I often wondered after David’s death: Had they known something then? Did their very souls recognize each other? Did Jacob, closer to God than anyone else I knew, somehow sense this was the last time he would see his grandpa? Hadthere been a message to the little boy in David’s long-held gaze? Did these two people—the six-year-old boy and the sixty-year-old man— realize something the rest of us didn’t?

When stupidity reaches its highest level, we act rubbish knowingly

Pour your heart out to me and fill my emptiness with your grief.

Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I had hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back... Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, the time has come.

Negative prophecies are reversible. The Lord reveals to conquer. You are created to reverse any negative with your prayers and the word of God.

What I want to know is how you go on when you look aroundand don’t see anywhere you want to go without the only personyou can’t have.

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.

Since he died some of the colours have disappeared. I have lost the violet of seeing him, the indigo of touching him, the blue of talking to him and the green of smelling him. But I can still see some of his colours. I still have the red of the feelings in my heart, the orange of his possessions, and the yellow of our memories.Which is why it feels so confusing. He is gone, but not entirely. The white light is no longer with me, but a few of his colours remain; vibrant, illuminating. Sometimes I lose sight even of these colours. I search in the shadows, hungry for another glimpse, desperate that I may have lost them forever. This is my darkness.

I made an attempt to reach him in his grief. I said, "I've had this pain. To tell you it will go away would be a lie. It will never go away. But, if you live long enough, it will cease to torture and will instead favor you. As we rely on the bitterness of strong tea to wake us, this too will become something you can use.

They say the truth hurts. And these words hurt more than any I have ever written. But they are the truth – The cold, hard, undeniable truth.Not letting go doesn’t keep him with you.It’s still over. He’s still gone.… And nothing will ever change that.

What was I going to do? The choices seemed basic and slim: Die. Exist. Live. I wanted to die, but with two young children to care for and a husband, that wasn't an option. Exist. I could do that. I was doing that now. but how flat and lifeless. How dreary and endless the long march would be until I met Charlotte again. The only option that resonated with me was to live. But how? I wanted to want to live. That was the best I could do in that moment.

Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)

To lose what we never owned might seem an eccentric Bereavement but Presumption has its Affliction as actually as Claim --

Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present.

Sitting on my bed with all these things I used to love but not loving them anymore, I just wanted to set them on fire. That's when I knew I was never going to be all right again.

Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.

...grief had no mercy, time limit, or expiration date.

The graces are restless today. They pweet and muss, shuddering their wings so that the feathers stick out at defensive angles. I feel that restlessness too. When the sea is fractious like this – when it chutters and schwaks against the moorings, when it won't talk but only mumbles – it's difficult to think.

I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. 'I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,' I told him ... 'because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.

There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: “WHY?”And here is the best answer I can give: Because.Because sometimes, life is damned unfair.Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply.Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm’s way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it.Because sometimes there aren’t really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time.Because acceptance is yet another of life’s “here’s a side of hurt” lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there.Why, you ask? Because, I answer.Inadequate yet true.

You don't understand," Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist.

A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

He didn't sleep. His mother was too close. He could see every crease on her face, every worry line he'd ever given her.

Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.

...we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what happened I don't know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this:Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? Where are the strangers going out of their way to help, screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us?There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat.

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water."When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

I write what I love.I will not stop – even when my hand hurts….…. because I cannot stop – even though my heart hurts….

Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

Wyatt told me once that if tenderness were a disease, I’d be terminal.

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

But when she finally got the wings to fly she realized she had nowhere else to go to...

When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.

Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers of rain, I am the fields of ripening grain. I am in the morning hush, I am in the graceful rush Of beautiful birds in circling flight, I am the starshine of the night. I am in the flowers that bloom, I am in a quiet room. I am in the birds that sing, I am in each lovely thing. Do not stand at my grave bereft I am not there. I have not left.