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Quote by Gina N. Brown

“Nobody can tell you how hard grief is, how to respond to it, or how long it will last. Sometimes it feels like a lingering houseguest who won’t reveal their departure date”

Quote by Gina N. Brown

Book:The Sugar Bowl Feud
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The Sugar Bowl Feud

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Gina N. Brown

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“...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
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“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
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“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?”

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Book:Motherthing
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“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
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