#mourn

How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury? ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#casket #death #funeral #heart #loss

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying, If I am dead, as dead I well may be, You'll come and find the place where I am lying, And kneel and say Ave there for me, And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be, For you will bend and tell me that you love me, And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me ↗

— Frederick Weatherly

#death #grief #lyrics #mourning #music

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days. ↗

— Victoria Hanley

#grief #mourning #queen #death

Farewell is said by the living, in life, every day. It is said with love and friendship, with the affirmation that the memories are lasting if the flesh is not. ↗

— R.A. Salvatore

#death #mourning #death

Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude. ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#longing #mourning #death

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air. ↗

— Gail Caldwell

#cancer #death #friendship #grief #loss

As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew. ↗

— Roz Chast

#cleaning #death #mourning #parents #perception

She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#loss #morning #mourn #withdrawal #death

That small world, like the great one out of doors, had the capacity of easily forgetting its dead; and when the cook had said she was a quiet-tempered lady, and the housekeeper had said it was the common lot, and the butler had said who'd have thought it, and the housemaid had said she couldn't hardly believe it, and the footman had said it seemed exactly like a dream, they had quite worn the subject out, and began to think their mourning was wearing rusty too. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#mourning #death

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body! ↗

— Homer

#death #greece #grief #mourning #death