“It was a refuge by the sea, yet she had no interest in the moving tide or the solace it tendered. The haunting wail of her own cry was unfamiliar to her ear, rising from uncharted depths within her. Her heart felt broken and it could not be mended. Her legs felt weak and they could not be strengthened. She lay under the bedcovers and wept, and turned her cheek to rest on the pillow.”
Source: Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale
“Things are sometimes faded but they will always become clear, where there seems nothing but bad look closer, you’re sure to find good.”
Source: Whisk Of Dust: Too Unseen Distance
“Right after her funeral I felt the way you feel when it suddenly starts raining hard, and you look around and find no place to take shelter.”
Source: The Story of the Lost Child
“Your parents bring you into this world, and then they move on without you and leave you behind. I know that that's the natural order of things, Z., and yet the pain of that whole arrangement is incredible, isn't it? We're all staggering around brokenhearted. By "arrangement" I mean "mortality", I guess. The grief fades with time but we stay abandoned.”
Source: Sea of Tranquility
“Sometimes, well into middle age, I composed letters to my father. In my dreams, I would meet him on a busy street, after many lost years, and he would receive me with the same old warmth. We would get into a little train together, or sit in a dark hall, watching a screen lit up with bright, moving images. 'Where were you all these years?' I would ask him, and he would ruffle my hair. My father hadn't died; he was a traveller in a different dimension, and he would turn up every now and then, just to see if I was all right.”
Source: Lone Fox Dancing
“Have you news of my boy Jack? ”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!”
Source: Sea Warfare
“We are all unique, in life and in death. We are born, we live, we die, and we grieve, but my grief is not like yours.”
Source: My Grief Is Not Like Yours: Learning to Live after Unimaginable Loss—A Daughter's Journey
“Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can't, at least, teach me how to touch my dead.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“She wrote his name on a piece of paper
and lit it with a match.
The letters curled
as they turned dark and misshapen
until she didn’t recognize them.
They were figments of something
that she had done in her past, lost
into some other form of existence.
Where did the letters go now?
She tried to find traces within the ash
of some resemblance of what used to be.
She dug down, her fingers turning
black and gray like the depths of her.
He was gone.
Gone.
What was she left with but ashes and darkness once the light of the flame went out? The smell of smoke lingered like a memory of him. Was this the end or could she write a new word? Not a new name, not his name, but could she call a new word into existence? A new piece of HER; a new reason for her existence? Picking up the permanent marker, Amy placed it in her pocket for later. Ashes blow in the creek bed and blend with the stream, moving down like sand in an hourglass.”
Source: Hourglass in Grace
“powerless and bold
in the darkness and cold,
she was the last thing
that she could control”
Source: Hourglass in Grace