#grief

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help. ↗

— Cheryl Strayed

#grief #love #mother #death

... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#grief #quotes #death

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#grief #love #widowhood #death

There came a moment in this journey when I freely realized that the lives most of lead are small. Important, but small. Our radius reaches family, clients, friends for whom we do selfless and amazing feats. But our sphere of influence is local.... So our illnesses/deaths are small, too. Not unimportant. Just local in nature... - 209 ↗

— Robin Romm

#death-of-a-loved-one #grief-inspirational #death

There was something about other people's grief that was so exposing, so personal, that she felt she shouldn't be looking. ↗

— Jane Fallon

#grief #life #personal #death

My life is now divided into two periods: With June and After June. I can't wrap my mind around the idea of it. ↗

— Hannah Harrington

#loss #life

Three years? That's a thousand tomorrows, ma'am. ↗

— Karen Kingsbury

#bull-rider #cf #grief #horses #karen

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part. ↗

— John Irving

#grief #loss #love

It is the heart that has been pierced that feels the most. ↗

— Jocelyn Murray

#heartbreak #love #sorrow #love

Listen to me. Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#heartbreak #upset #change