The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: grief, loss

Meghan O'Rourke

the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools…It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

I’m sometimes scared that I’m forgetting what my dad was like.

Do you know what it’s like to be blessed with someone so special, to love them so much it hurts, and then have them taken from you forever?

I’m crying again. I cry so often now that sometimes I don’t even realize it until the tears are already streaming down my cheeks.

Why did the sun rise this morningIt’s not naturalI don’t want to see the lightIt’s not time to close the casketOr say Kaddish for my sonI’ve already buried two fathersWith a mother to comeIsn’t that enough Lord who wants usTo exalt and santify HimI don’t want to wear the mourner’s ribbonOr wake up crying every morningFor God knows how longI don’t want to tuck my son into the groundAs if we were putting him to bedFor the last timeClose the prayer book I will not pretendThat God brings peace upon usAnd upon all IsraelI don’t want to hear anyoneScolding me from her wheelchairBecause I’m crying too hardI’m not worried about a heart attackNothingnessYou’ve already broken my heartI will not forgive youSun of emptinessSky of blank cloudsI will not forgive youIndifferent GodUntil you give back my son

Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a while “they’ll be home soon”He told himself to tell his wife”They’re only taking a long walk”Mahler scored five of those poemsIn 1901 and 1904 for a vocalistAnd an orchestra to break your heartAs soon as I heard the plaintive oboe And the descending movement of the hornAnd the lyric baritone enteringI felt I should not be listeningTo Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singingKindertotenlieder with the Berlin PhilharmonicMahler’s wife was superstitiousAnd thought he was chancing disasterWith Songs on the Death of Children”Now the sun wants to rise so brightlyAs if nothing terrible had happened overnightThat tragedy happened to me alone”Mahler knew he could never have written themAfter his four-year-old daughter diedFrom scarlet fever three years laterHe said he felt sorry for himselfThat he needed to write these songsAnd for the world that would listen to them

Stephanie Oakes

When I lost my son, I became a citizen of a country I never knew existed.

It was only one man who had gone, but it felt like forever, something so permanent and unstoppable that it blasted her. If she were a tree, she would drop all her leaves.

S.D. Hendrickson

The idea that a loss will get easier as time passes, is complete bullshit. It doesn’t get easier; you just learn to function while balancing the large burden on your shoulders.

Michele Young-Stone

I felt guilty because I was upset by the loss of one friend when the Old Man had lost nearly everyone he loved. Loss, I soon learned from him, is not measured in numbers. It’s not comparative. It’s in here. I’m touching my chest now.

Denise would never get over it. She knew that. Tommy’s bones at the bottom of the well. She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photohgraphing them the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She’d clutched them to her chest. Run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There but not there. Some part of her wanted those bones. Wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep. To carry his skull around in her purse so she’d be with him always. She understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things.

Rachel Naomi Remen

We burn out not because we don’t care but because we don’t grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.