#loss

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you. ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#dying #grief #grieving #loss #love

Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#death #loss #death

He wore the memory of her embrace like armor, and though he knew it would not save his life, it would be all that was left to him to ease his passage into whatever lay beyond. ↗

— Andrew Levkoff

#life-and-death #love #love-and-dying #love-and-loss #love-and-memory

Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in the end? The bottom line is, it's my fault. I didn't love her enough. I didn't do enough. I wasn't enough. There's no excuse. There is nothing that will ever make that okay. ↗

— Hannah Harrington

#grief #loss #love #death

As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents' bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss. ↗

— Robert J. Wiersema

#death #grief #loss #death

May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you. ↗

— Herculine Barbin

#grief #hermaphrodite #intersex #loss #love

If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later. ↗

— Elizabeth Berg

#loss #death

Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone. So it is with all the memories of him. They all lead into blackness. All I can do is remember him, I cannot experience him. Nothing new can happen between us. ↗

— Nicholas Wolterstorff

#grief #loss-of-child #nicholas-wolterstorff #death

The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss. ↗

— Otsuichi

#epiphany #insight #loss #love #death

Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world. ↗

— Otsuichi

#contradictions #contradictory #death #epiphany #gratitude