#bereavement

It's being without him that I'll never get used to. ↗

— Christopher Buecheler

#grief #loss #love #love

I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#grief #love #love

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#grief #truth

Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it. Sadness, whether it be from bereavement, or disappointment, or misfortune of any kind may linger on through life ↗

— James De Mille

#disappointment #horror #misfortune #sadness #life

my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping but I shall go on living. ↗

— Pablo Neruda

#mourning #walking

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#grief #loss #love #pain #spirituality

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#gift #grief #loss #love #passion

You never know what you have till you've lost it. ↗

— Alyson Noel

#loss #misattributed #lost

Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life. ↗

— Caitlin Kittredge

#grief #loss #life

Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#grief #beauty