“Grief is a swarm of feelings that swirls inside of you for your whole life; it's a weight that settles around the eyes, transforms the shape of a laugh. It is sadness mixed with a furious rage churning in an ocean of helplessness. It's an old word, dating back to the 1200s, and its latin roots mean to "make heavy." The first six definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary describe various types of hardship or physical pain. The seventh definition makes me think grief is the correct term for the storm of emotion I associate with my mom's mental illness. "Mental pain, distress, or sorry...deep or violent sorrow, caused by loss or trouble; a keen or bitter feeling of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for mishap to oneself or others.”
Source: And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir – A Poignant and Inspiring Coming-of-Age Story About Mothers and Daughters
“Sometimes there is a sadness,
That even tears cannot speak.
My heart alone knows the pain,
A pain so sharp and deep.
Why then do I hold on?
Why do I follow where it leads?
Ah, perhaps because it draws me closer,
It carries me where it is sweet.”
Source: Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief
“...it was Leticia, Shawn's girlfriend, kissing him goodbye between shrieks. I think she hoped her voice would somehow keep him alive, would clot the blood. But I think she knew deep down in the deepest part of her downness she was kissing him goodbye.”
“How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and glue
them back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelming
in a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had been
playing when….”
Source: More Things in Heaven and Earth
“Grief, I learned, doesn’t care how hard you attempt to understand her. She doesn’t care if you are already depressed or suffer from suicidal ideation. She doesn’t wait for you to be ready, and the longer you defer her presence, the heavier her weight becomes.”
Source: Where the River Flows: A memoir of loss, love & life with an Eating Disorder
“...you had to look loss in the eye, and if you were going to survive it, you had to believe that there were two different parts of every person: the stuff that ended up in the ground, and the stuff that didn't.”
Source: The Big Finish
“For me, time is much more fluid, both a rushing river and a stagnant pond. It seems like forever since Mimi died, and I’ve been stuck, floating in a lake of grief, yet she was here yesterday, just beyond the bend in the stream.”
Source: Eating Yellow Paint
“Women need space to grieve, not husbands.”
Source: The Spirit Engineer
“Vicky's only been dead an hour and yet she's already a memory.”
“In truth, I selected action over grief.”
Source: My Life with Karma