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Quote by Gift Gugu Mona

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A Manual for Victory

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Gift Gugu Mona

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“These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determinded to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.”

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Book:The Dead Moms Club: A Memoir about Death, Grief, and Surviving the Mother of All Losses
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“Today I had to meet a man I haven’t seen for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well—how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, ‘Yes, of course, of course. I’d forgotten that he thought that—or disliked this, or knew soand-so—or jerked his head back that way.’ I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night— little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.”

DeathGriefMemory
Book:A Grief Observed
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“You cannot deal with grief, not really. It is not a monster you can slay and be done with. Grief is an ambush predator, and we are the prey. It stalks us our entire lives, hiding in smells and sounds, in solitude and in crowds. It waits in items and in thoughts. Memories are the hunting grounds of grief, and when it pounces, its bite is venomous. It inflicts sadness or rage or sometimes despair. But grief is not an adventurous predator. Always it stalks old memories, not new. And that is how we move on. New memories where it is not welcome.”

Grief
Book:Death's Beating Heart
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“At the Meet she was a prey to her self-conscious shyness, so that she fancied people were whispering. There was no one now with bowed, patient shoulders to stand between her and those unfriendly people. Colonel Antrim came up. 'Glad to see you out, Stephen.' But his voice sounded stiff because he was embarrassed—everyone felt just a little embarrassed, as people will do in the face of bereavement.”

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Book:The Well Of Loneliness
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“Everybody grieves their own way. He's got his, and I've got mine. ... Personally, I'm a big fan of a bath. I get through my day, do what has to be done, and then at night I draw a hot bath. Sit in there as long as I need to, just wailing and carrying on. Some nights I worry I may never stop, turn into a human prune before I manage to wring out all my tears. But I figure eventually there's gonna be a day I don't need that bath. And maybe sometime after that, a whole week will go by before I have to go up and turn on the tap. Then, later on, maybe a month. But until then, I don't worry about it. Right now, the thought of that bath is what gets me through the day.”

Grief
Book:I Did It for You
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