4,061 Quotes About Loss

What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane--clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves--was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that.

It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

If you can't tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark storyline. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it. The trees will not ask, "How are you really?" and the wind doesn't care if you cry.

When someone you love dies, you don't just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be.

What we need to remember -- as a working practice -- is to honor all griefs. Honor all losses, small and not small. Life changing and moment changing. And then, not to compare them. That all people experience pain is not medicine for anything.

All those encouragements from others about having so much to live for, that there's still goodness to come in your life --- they feel irrelevant. They kind of are irrelevant. You can't cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing, loss to become whoever they are "meant" to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen.

Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.