494 Quotes About Grieving

And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.

It was always with her now, that sadness, like one of those rare orchids you saw clinging to jungle branches on TV, always blooming in her at unexpected moments, and even on the move, scuffing down the hall toward Doodle's room, the thought of evading it called it into being. Sadness. The word itself didn't do the feeling justice. What she felt was a more complicated alchemy of emotion, equal parts grief and loneliness and longing, with measures of resentment and self-pity drizzled in.

Have I not yet discovered that the ashes of today enrich the soil of tomorrow?

The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be.

In my gut-wrenching honesty and by acknowledging our big, big God, I found peace.

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.

My dear, we do not move on from grief; we move through it.

When I could find something to laugh about for 30 minutes, my grief lightened just enough to make the day bearable.