Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Carissa Broadbent

Quote by Carissa Broadbent

“The fine details in his face struck me like a knife to the chest - all the things I didn't realize I'd forgotten, like the slight crookedness to his nose or the way he favored the left side over the right. The version of him in my mind was generic, sanded down me months of absence, even as my grief clung to him.”

Quote by Carissa Broadbent

Book:The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King
Create image

Work

The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Carissa Broadbent

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Carissa Broadbent. more

You May Also Like

“If I could stop getting caught in the old cobwebs of disappointment and accept my dad as he was, I might enjoy myself too. In the emotional tumbling routine of my father slowly dying, I did manage to land the dismount from the old pain. I successfully let go of any blame or desire from a different version of a dad. He and I were both grateful when I could just easily and simply sit with him in love.”

LoveFatherGriefAcceptance Of Others
Book:End of the Hour: A Therapist's Memoir
Create image

“...It felt like permission. The kind I hadn't let myself have for [six months]. The kind of permission I'd been waiting for, as I sat alone in [her] apartment in grief, welled up so high, it felt suffocating. The permission I thought I'd given myself. But it hadn't been permission to cry. It had been a command to be strong. To be ok. I told myself over and over, I had to be ok. And finally, finally! Someone gave me permission to come undone.”

DeathLossGriefRecovery
Book:The Seven Year Slip
Create image

“Speeding through grief always has a cost. To bury somebody's supposed-to-be is also to bury a story that's untold. When you bury someone's story like that, it gets lodged in the ribcage, it gets radioactive, it festers, it shouts to be heard. Grief is always a voice that needs to speak. If you suppress it, it still speaks— but not always in ways that are healthy. Not in the ways you need. It pushes through your skin like rogue splinters. Burying a future loss without telling its story can make you sick. Timesick. You get split between timelines. The further along you go, the further away you get from that dream, and you look around and wonder how people can keep going while you want the world to stop, time to freeze, to get back to your real universe. And you get well-meaning people around you, always the ones who mean well, who are nudging you forward, shoving you, really, and you clutch two timelines until you're ripped in half. Part of my role as a chaplain, I've learned, is to make room for these original timelines. That they may be spoken, shared. The story told. "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you, Zora Neale Hurston said. It must be conversely true that there is no greater peace than to tell that story.”

LossGrief
Book:As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve
Create image

“She looks so much like a person hurt beyond belief, with her rubbed-to-fuzz hair and her screaming and her blistered eyes. Nothing else matters but her pain, the biggest, loudest thing in the world, unimaginable, a way that people only ever expect to feel maybe once in their life, if ever at all, and maybe never even really recover from. She gets this way all the time. Ripped to shreds when a relationship ends. Is this real? Could this possibly be real? Can real grief even happen this many times to a single human body?”

GriefBpd
Book:Motherthing
Create image

“If you had never lived, and my mind was full of you--a fantasy figure with whom I am having an intense personal relationship--they'd give me treatment. They'd lock me up for being delusional. As it is, yes, it's an embarrassment. The black-armband days were easier. It was a sign to say--I am a bit odd. Give me space. Give me time. Grief takes time. I am grieving. I discover that grieving means living with someone who is no longer there.”

DeathLossGriefMourningDelusionsEmbarassment
Book:Night Side of the River
Create image