612 Quotes About Mourning

You think you've stopped crying And then the blues come back, You wonder what brought them: The red pen? The wind in the yard? The plaid shirt in the bank? Your buried grief seeps to the surface, Like oil under tar sands. Let it go. It's the rich black residue of the past, Dead life becomes this stuff that sticks to the soles of your feet, Welling up when it damned well pleases. Let it go.

Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it's a secret of your profession, one people don't want to know.

I close my eyes and listen as they circle the living room, making polite offerings. The house is full and yet quiet; it’s as if my ear is pressed against a wall, listening for some great truth. As if we’re underwater, our lives submerged. I imagine the furniture dunking and bobbing, floating and sinking in the sea as we try to arrange it on the ocean floor, one hopeless piece at a time.

For the funeral, I had to show my proper mourning face. Truly, I longed to break down and have a full-on emotional attack; perhaps if I let myself go long enough, I might get all the pain out of my system. I had no hope of doing such a thing in front of everyone I knew. It simply wasn't proper.

I pause as the clocks from Mother’s collection sound the hour. From every room come staggered chimes, cuckoos calling out. A moment later, the sound of ticking. The house a metronome. We are empty, as if our insides have been carved out. That is what death does, I think. It makes us into ticking clocks, in need of winding, hollow and mechanized.

It's a tunnel, not a cave.

The mourning of a loved one never ends with a funeral. It comes back every so often, like a stage performer eager for a curtain call and expects you to be loud about it....I gave it all the lung capacity I had.

The size and height of the tree determines how heavily the ground will shake when it falls. The cassava tree falls and not even the pests in the forest are aware. The baobab tree falls and the whole forest looks empty! Such is human life!

If I believe, truly believe our soulsare meant to cross paths, in each andevery life, traversing millennia and repeatingthis sweet interaction time and time againThen what is one lifetimewhere those interactions arecut short- For the Departed