“are you going to listen to the wind, or are you going to wait for floating lilies to deliver seeds of condolences?”
“You can mourn your own changes, too. That you are no longer the person you used to be is, in my opinion, a good reason for mourning. It can be a cause for celebration, sometimes, too. But you can always give who you once were a send-off, a memorial, before you move on from them.”
Source: Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations
“She saw the birth unfolding, saw the small creature with those strangely wise eyes that seemed to belong to every newborn. And then the years rushing on, the child growing, faces taking the shape they would carry into old age.
But not all. As mother after mother stepped through her, futures flashed bright, and some died quickly indeed. Fraught, flickering sparks, ebbing, winking out, darkness rushing in. And at these she cried out, filled with anguish even as she understood that souls travelled countless journeys, of which only one could be known by a mortal, so many, in countless perturbations, and that the loss belonged only to others, never to the child itself, for in its inarticulate, ineffable wisdom, understanding was absolute; the passage of life that seemed tragically short could well be the perfect duration, the experience complete.
Others, however, died in violence, and this was a crime, an outrage against life itself. Here, among these souls, there was fury, shock, denial. There was railing, struggling, bitter defiance.”
Source: Toll the Hounds
“Yet no one is really alone; those who live no more echo still within our thoughts and words, and what they did is part of what we have become — Blessing of Memory, Mediations Before Kaddish”
Source: Small World
“There was also a belief, handed down from antiquity, that black made the wearer invisible to the spirits of the dead. (That is why black is the colour of mourning in the Western world: originally it was a means of protection, not an expression of sorrow.)”
Source: The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year
“Our contemporary Western celebrations forget the dead altogether, or at least remove them from any association with grief and loss. They offer no comfort to those who mourn. We are, after all, a society that has done all it can to erase death, to pursue youth to the bitter end, and to sideline the elderly and infirm. For most of us, the old tradition of laying out our own dead is long forgotten, and the idea that we might be intimate with death is now some kind of a gothic joke. Today's Halloween simply reflects what we secretly think—that death is a surrender to decay that makes us monsters.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“The sadness shouldn’t cancel out what had been so bright and full and beautiful. Just because the cherry blossoms would fall didn’t mean you should mourn them on the tree.”
Source: Pack Up the Moon
“Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?”
Source: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“I am afraid of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after...”
Source: Notes on Grief
“Grief returns with the revolving year.
- Adonais”
Source: Percy Bysshe Shelley: An Anthology