“Dying has taught me a great deal about living — about facing hard truths consciously, about embracing the suffering as well as the joy. Wrapping my arms around the hard parts was perhaps the great liberating experience of my life.”
Source: The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After
“no matter how prepared you are
you're never ready”
Source: The Widows' Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival
“Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.”
Source: How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses
“Once
over dinner I told her, of course he loved you!
how could you doubt it?
and she burst into tears, But he died!”
Source: The Widows' Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival
“Our grief mirrors our love.”
Source: The Widows' Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival
“You are my emergency contact.
This is the emergency!
My life is burning down!”
“Living in Greece I learned
why so many women wore black:
a year for parents, for a husband
forever, telling the neighbors take
care of me, I am weak with grief,
I have turned to ash inside.”
Source: The Widows' Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival
“I don't need again to learn
the bitter lesson
that everything I love
is a flame between two fingers,
no act undone, no word unsaid.”
“A moment later the music began, and Kate shrank beneath the onslaught of its message: the fury of hope and joy that towered in the notes, outburning the sunlight and outpouring the volumes of the sea. All that was bold and noble and happy in created sound burst from the metempirical quills, and it was a blasphemy not to rejoice.
Christian died in its midst, purposeful and successful; the last struggle unseen by anyone but Kate, and laying no bridle on the living.”
Source: The Game of Kings
“Some might claim that like the secret of flying is missing the ground, the secret to immortality is simply not dying”
Source: Pearls Before Swine