#loss

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#death #faith #grief #grieving #loss

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss. ↗

— Meghan O'Rourke

#grief #identity #loss #mourning #relationships

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