612 Quotes About Mourning

Aunt YA walked in, saw Kirabo, and wailed, 'Tom, you have not loved this child enough!’ and got down on her knees and keened. Uncle Ndiira disappeared. The women picked up Aunt YA’s lament like a tidal wave.

In a time of grief, it's the symbols that cut the deepest--the single red shoe in a pile of dusty gray war rubble, the grease-stained recipe card in Grandma's handwriting, the flag-draped casket saluted at the airport, the first wildflower that pushes its way through the ashes of last year's forest fire, the guitar whose voice would never be heard.

It became all the more obvious that people--no matter their age or what brought them to that place--grieve in different ways and on different timetables.

When a loss is ambiguous, no public ceremony acknowledges the loss and its fallout, or honors the memory of the loved one. It was true for us. People still were unsure how to respond to the endlessness of our unique form of loss. Should they grieve with us or pretend life was fine now that Zach had lived through it all? Would we resent it if they didn't mention the injury, or if they did?

Death and its miserable sort of demise had crawled into his life at such a young, testing age and managed to stick around through the years—a kind of parasitic creature with tenacity and commitment and all the things Kai had never learned—keeping a constant heaviness in his mind, a blurring exhaustion never at ease.

There's nothing to do. You've been in the business long enough to understand grief. That's the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don't want to, you don't want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death's taught you that much at least.

We abandon the dead. We abandon them.

This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you.And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.That's what I'm here to tell you.

Everyone was in scrubs. I noticed one man who was not in scrubs. “Is this the wife,” he said to the driver. Then he looked at me. “I'm your social worker.” And I guess that was when I knew.That's something else to remember. If they give you a social worker, you're in trouble.