#loss

When nothing becomes the vocal Then nothing becomes the focal And nothing’s becoming at all ↗

— Kate Kaiser

#heart #kate-kaiser #kateofhoboken #katie-hahn #loss

...such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#sin #faith

I can't begin to guess her story, except that there were undoubtedly two times or three, when what had happened to her was grievously at odds with what she had expected - so grievously at odds that any return to the faith or the patterns of the time before the event became impossible. ↗

— Deirdre McNamer

#faith

the inlet our friend looks as he did when we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die of grief, for I know that this boy grew into a man who was a faithful friend who died. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#memory #poetry #faith

We've all lost something along the way. ↗

— Po Bronson

#loss #love #struggle #family

I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as quickly as possible. And now that I knew that the time we had together was limited, I was holding on to it, trying to stretch it out, all the while wishing I’d appreciated what I’d had earlier. ↗

— Morgan Matson

#loss #family

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love. ↗

— Pete Hamill

#loss #love #new-york-city #tears #family

Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home. ↗

— John Irving

#grief #loss #family

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them. ↗

— Joan Didion

#loss-of-faith #faith

and it is hard to let go, to imagine alternatives, but you are bold with unknowing, you are ready to explore. ↗

— Terra Elan McVoy

#growth #loss #love #friendship