3,968 Quotes About Grief

What's even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you're diseased or something.

When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half.This is the duality of loss.

It occurred to me that grief is like a tunnel. You enter it without a choice because you must get to the other side. The darkness of it plays tricks on you and sometimes you can even forget where you are or what your purpose is. I believe that people, now and again, get lost or stuck in that tunnel and never find their way out.

Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

You breathe upon us nowthrough solid assertionsof yourself: teaspoons, goblets,seas of carpet, a forestof old plants to be wateredan old man in an adjoiningroom to be touched and fed.And all this universedares us to lay a fingeranywhere, save exactlyas you would wish it done.

I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

Witnessing a mother's slow physical decline can be the equivalent of of experiencing long-term trauma. The daughter's feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear persist. And persist. And persist. She may alternate between wanting to protect her mother and resenting her, an advance-and-retreat dance of identification and rejection than can span years.

Since I've been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was "everything" for me, and I've completely forgotten that I'd written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers.