About Grief

23 Insights To Help You Grieve Well – The Movie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ‘Notes On Grief’

The news (the sudden death of her father) is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••    

My sister Uche says she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, ‘No! Don’t tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true.’

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••    

Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father (his expression one minute utterly deadpan and, the next, wide open with delighted laughter), but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails of. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••    

It was so fast, too fast. It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise, not during a pandemic that has shut down the world.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••    

My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too – why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and of all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual, and that people are inviting me to speak somewhere and that regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is forcing new skins on me, scraping scales from my eyes. I regret my past certainties: Surely you should mourn, talk through it, face it, go through it. The smug certainties of a person yet unacquainted with grief. I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the centre of this churning.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts… I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is a grace in denial, Chuks says, words that I repeat to myself. A refuge, this denial, this refusal to look. Of course, the effort is its own grieving, and so I am un-looking in the oblique shadow of looking, but imagine the catastrophe of a direct, unswerving stare.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Often, too, there is the urge to run and run, to hide. But I cannot always run, and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief – when I read the death certificate, when I draft a death announcement – I feel a shimmering panic. In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobbing. I am unable to quiet myself until I look away.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I wish I had not missed those few days of calling them, because I would have seen that he wasn’t just mildly unwell – or I would have sensed it if it wasn’t obvious – and I would have insisted on hospital much sooner. I wish, I wish. The guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could have happened and all the ways the world could be reshaped, to prevent what happened on 10 June, to make it un-happen.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

So, I knew. I was so close to my father that I knew, without wanting to know, without fully knowing that I knew. A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

How quickly my life has become another life, how pitiless this becoming is, and yet how slow I am to adapt.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Okey sends me a video of an elderly woman who walks through our front door, crying, and I think, I have to ask Daddy who she is. In that small moment, what has been true for the forty-two years of my life is still true – that my father is tangible, inhaling, exhaling; reachable to talk to and to watch the twinkle of his eyes behind his glasses. Then, with a horrible lurch, I remember again. That brief forgetting feels like both a betrayal and a blessing.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.

‘Demise.’ A favourite of Nigerians, it conjures for me dark distortions. ‘On the demise of your father:’ I detest ‘demise’.

‘He is resting’ brings not comfort but a scoff that trails its way to pain. He could very well be resting in his room in our house in Abba, fan whirring warm air, his bed strewn with folded newspapers, a sudoku book, an old brochure from a funeral, a Knights of St Mulumba calendar, a bag filled with his bottles of medicine, and his notebooks with the carefully lined pages on which he recorded every single thing he ate, a diabetic’s account-taking.

‘He is in a better place’ is startling in its presumptuousness and has a taint of the inapt. How would you know – and shouldn’t I, the bereaved, be privy to this information first? Should I really be learning this from you?

‘He was eighty-eight’ so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. Yes, he was eighty-eight, but a cataclysmic hole now suddenly gapes open in your life, a part of you snatched away forever.

ʻIt has happened, so just celebrate his life,’ an old friend wrote, and it incensed me. How facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the very permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. ‘Find peace in your memories’, I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succour, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.” Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain. I hope that it is a question of time – that it is just too soon, too terribly soon, to expect memories to serve only as salve.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple ‘I’m sorry’, because in its banality it presumes nothing. Ndo, in Igbo, comforts more, a word that is ‘sorry’ with a metaphysical heft, a word with borders wider than mere ´sorry’. Concrete and sincere memories from those who knew him comfort the most, and it warms me that the same words recur: ‘honest’, ‘calm’, ‘kind’, ‘strong’, ‘quiet’, ‘simple’, ‘peaceful’, integrity’.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief: the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

But I am not ready. I talk only to my closest family. It is instinctive, my recoiling. I imagine the confusion of some relatives, their disapproval even, when faced with my withdrawal, the calls I leave unanswered, the messages unread. They might think it a mystifying self-indulgence or an affectation of fame, or both. In truth, at first it is a protective stance, a shrinking from further pain, because I am drained limp from crying, and speak about it would be to cry again. But later it is because I want to sit alone with my grief. I want to protect – hide? hide from? – these foreign sensations.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me. So precious was my bond with my father that I cannot lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

One day I am in the bathroom, completely alone, and I call my father by my fond nickname for him – ‘the original dada’ – and a brief blanket of peace enfolds me. Too brief. I am a person wary of the maudlin, but I am certain of this moment filled with my father. If it is a hallucination, then I want more of it, but it hasn’t happened again.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I reread Biography of Nigeria’s Foremost Professor of Statistics, Prof. James Nwoye Adichie by Emeritus Professor Alex Animalu, Professor Peter I. Uche and Jeff Unaegbu, published in 2013, three years before my father was made professor emeritus of the University of Nigeria… I feel a euphoric rush of gratitude to the authors. Why does this line – the children and I adore him’ – from my mother’s tribute in the book soothe me so? Why does it feel pacifying and prophetic? It pleases me that it exists, forever declared in print.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My best friend, Uju, tells me how my father turned to her at the end of my Harvard Class Day speech, in2018, and, in a voice more powerful for being muted, said, ‘Look, they are all standing for her.’ I weep at this. Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter. His pride in me mattered, more than anyone else’s. He read everything I wrote, and his comments ranged from ‘this isn’t coherent at all’ to ‘you have outdone yourself’. Each time I travelled for speaking events, I would send him my itinerary and he would send texts to follow my progress. ‘You must be about to go onstage,’ he would write. ‘Go and shine.’

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘You have a particular laugh when you’re with Daddy,’ my husband tells me, ‘even when what he says isn’t funny.’ I recognize the high-pitched cackle he mimics, and I know it is not so much about what my father says as it is about being with him. A laugh that I will never laugh again. ‘Never’ has come to stay. ‘Never’ feels so unfairly punitive.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘Mama is sad because Grandpa died,’ my four-year-old daughter says to her cousin. ‘Died.’ She knows the word ‘died’. She pulls tissues out of a box and hands them to me. Her emotional alertness moves, surprises, impresses me. A few days later she asks, ‘When will Grandpa wake up again?’

I weep and weep, and wish that her understanding of the world were real. That grief was not about the utter impossibility of return.

One morning I am watching a video of my father on my phone, and my daughter glances at my screen and then swiftly places her hand over my eyes. ‘I don’t want you to watch the video of Grandpa, because I don’t want you to cry’ she says. She is hawk-eyed in her vigilance of my tears.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

On the Zoom calls, we are flailing, unprepared, uninformed on practical things. It is also an emotional floundering. We have been so fortunate, to be happy, to be enclosed in a safe, intact family unit, and so we do not know what to do with this rupture. Until now, grief belonged to other people. Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief? We stumble; we veer from an extreme forced cheer to passive aggressiveness, to arguing about where guests are be served. Happiness becomes a weakness because it leaves you defenceless in the face of grief.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

One night, in a vivid dream, my father comes back. He is sitting on his usual sofa in the living room in Abba, and then at some point it becomes the living room in Nsukka. The hospital made a mistake. What about my brother Okey’s visits to the mortuary? Also, a case of mistaken identity. I am ecstatic, but worried it might be a dream, and so, in the dream, I slap my arm to make sure it is not a dream, and still my father is sitting there talking quietly. I wake up with a pain so confounding that it fills up my lungs. How can your unconscious turn on you with such cruelty?

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

On 28 March, my favourite aunt, my mother’s younger sister Caroline, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, in a British hospital that was already locked down because of the coronavirus. A joyous woman. We were stunned by sadness. The virus brought close the possibility of dying, the commonness of dying, but there was still a semblance of control, if you stayed home, if you washed your hands. With her death, the idea of control was gone. Death could just come hurtling at you on any day and at any time, as it had with her. She was perfectly fine one moment, the next she had a very bad headache and the next she was gone. A dark time inexorably darkened.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I look back now at my father saying her death was ´shocking’, in a voice strained by that shock, and I imagine the universe further plotting sinisterly. In June, he would go, and a month later, on 11 July, his only sister, my Aunt Rebecca, heartbroken about the brother she had spoken to every day, would go too, in the same hospital as my father. An erosion, a vile rushing of floods, leaving our family forever misshapen. The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Why does the image of two red butterflies on a T-shirt make me cry? We don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve. I don’t particularly like T-shirts, but I spend hours on a customization website, designing T-shirts to memorialize my father, trying out fonts and colours and images. On some, I put his initials, JNA’, and, on others, the Igbo words ‘omekannia’ and ‘oyilinnia’ – which are similar in meaning, both a version of ´her father’s daughter’, but more exultant, more pride-struck.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He would approve of some of these T-shirts, I think. It is design as therapy, filling the silences I choose, because I must spare my loved ones my endless roiling thoughts. I must conceal just how hard grief’s iron clamp is. I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I feel to death, the awareness of my mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency. An impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have?  

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief has, as one of its many egregious components, the onset of doubt. No, I am not Imagining it. Yes, my father truly was lovely.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mitch Albom  ‘Have a Little Faith’

The only whole heart is a broken heart.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••      

Melissa Ashley ‘The Bee and the Orange Tree’

After the infant was taken from Henrietta, the wound inside her was reopened. She stopped sleeping. She refused to eat. She began to spit and froth at the mouth…She broke the terracotta jug that held her drinking water and took the shards into her hand, tearing them along the flesh of her legs and arms, until the skin split and bled.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

The distress and grief Angelina had experienced at the funeral began to echo inside her. Bowing her head, she straightened her posture, determinedly crossing between headstones. The placement of Henrietta’s grave was inscribed in Angelina’s memory, and in little time she had located the du Blois plot.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

Melissa Ashley  ‘The Birdman’s Wife’

While I struggled to overcome my grief, John had thrown himself into work. He was still filling his days and often nights with research and writing, though without the boundless energy and enthusiasm that used to sweep us all up in his wake.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In the wake of our son’s death, the light-heartedness and intimacy that had strengthened our bond in the early days of our marriage and brought such pleasure seemed to have deserted us.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Though grief was an emotion I knew well, it became a too familiar garment that I resisted taking off – walking in it, sleeping in it, washing it once a week.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Jennifer Ashton, M.D. ‘Life After Suicide’

There were tears and hugs and support all around me; but I was still in too much shock to take it in or even connect to it, as if I were watching the whole thing through the wrong end of a telescope.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The element of routine is vastly important to people who are dealing with profound shock and grief, to remind them that their whole lives haven’t been blown apart.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Milestones are painful, they dredge up memories whether we are ready for them or not.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“The only way to the other side of the pain is through it, not around it, so you have to just let yourself feel it and trust that someday it really will get better.” Dr. Sue Simring

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“Complicated grief” happens when people delay getting help after a terrible trauma, which allows the trauma to become so ingrained and intrusive, like a neglected wound, that the grief process doesn’t progress as time goes on, and it becomes more difficult to treat.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Trying to bury pain in a lot of denial and busyness instead of addressing it doesn’t heal that pain, it only postpones it and gives it the power to blindside you when it inevitably catches up with you.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Loss and grief aren’t a one-and-done event. They’re a lifetime process, a part of your life from the moment of your loss. Grief is love. You grieve because you loved. Grief work helps you move away from the trauma of how they died to remembering how they lived, and then helps you to develop a new relationship with the deceased – the death of a loved one doesn’t mean the death of the relationship, after all.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Little by little, as the anaesthesia of grief wore off, the actual feeling started coming back, instead of just the motions of those feelings.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The loss will always be a part of you. It will only define you, and the one you lost, if you let it. Your grief can sentence you to the dark, bitter life of a victim, or it can fuel a rich life of finding ways to honour your loved one and keep them alive through you. The choice is yours.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is no “right” or “wrong” way to grieve, we just have to do whatever works to get us through our grief, back on our feet and moving forward again.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“Life is not about avoiding pain. Life is about experiencing pain, processing it, learning from it, and living through it.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Fredrik Backman ‘A Man Called Ove’

He stands there, slowly twisting the wedding ring on his finger. As if looking for something else to say. He still finds it painfully difficult being the one to take charge of a conversation. That was always something she took care of. He usually just answered. This is a new situation for them both. Finally Ove squats, digs up the plant he bought last week and carefully puts it in a plastic bag. He turns the frozen soil carefully before putting in the new plants.

‘They’ve bumped up the electricity prices again,’ he informs her as he gets to his feet.

He looks at her for a long time. Finally he puts his hand carefully on the big boulder and caresses it tenderly from side to side, as if touching her cheek.
‘I miss you,’ he whispers.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

On Sundays they went to church. Not because either of them had any excessive zeal for God, but because Ove’s mum had always been insistent about it. They sat at the back, each of them staring at a patch on the floor until it was over. And, in all honesty, they spent more time missing Ove’s mum than thinking about God. It was her time, so to speak, even though she was no longer there.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ove had only just turned sixteen when his father died. A hurtling carriage on the track. Ove was left with not much more than a Saab, a ramshackle house a few miles out of town and a dented old wristwatch. He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy. He wasn’t happy for several years after that.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned round in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Everyone called it an accident, of course. But no one who had met Ernest (Sonja’s father’s cat) could believe that he had run out in front of the car by accident. Sorrow does strange things to living creatures.

When Sonja came out of the waiting room she rested her forehead heavily against Ove’s broad chest.

‘I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ove told her about the driver smelling of wine and the bus veering into the crash barrier and the collision. The smell of burnt rubber. The ear-splitting crashing sound.

And about a child that would never come home.

And she wept. An ancient, inconsolable despair that screamed and tore and shredded them both as countless hours passed. Time and sorrow and fury flowed together in stark, long-drawn darkness. Ove knew there and then that he would never forgive himself for having got up from the seat at the exact moment, for not being there to protect them. And knew that this pain was for ever.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ove doesn’t know what happened to him after her funeral. The days and weeks floated together in such a way, and in such utter silence, that he could hardly describe what exactly he was doing. Before Parvaneh and that Patrick reversed into his post box he could barely remember saying a word to another human being since Sonja died.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Yaakov Barzilai ‘The Neighbor from Bergen Belsen’

I was standing in the middle of the crowd, and nobody paid any attention to my new shoes, a birthday present from my parents, but as I was already almost knee-deep in mud, they weren’t particularly conspicuous anyway. When Mum told me she had omitted to bring shoe-polish, I felt the tears clogging my throat. Dad was leaning on Mum, helpless, and my sister was half-hidden among Mum’s skirts.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

On the way we lost Dad.

It seems that at one of the twists in that pitch-black and merciless labyrinth, Dad was seized by an angel, and there was no knowing if he was numbered among the ministering angels or was one of a different kind.

The cup of my mother’s grief was running over. She didn’t blame anyone, except herself. All the arrows that she shot, she shot at herself. Suddenly, I was aware of Dad’s absence. I was used to the sound of his long silences, which had ended abruptly. I felt something had been taken from me that was part of my being, as if I had stopped being whole.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mum was in a state of sustained shock, and for four days she had been uncharacteristically silent. Grandpa, a taciturn man by nature, was busy all day reciting the Psalms. My mother’s silence had a devastating effect on my sister, who sat there in a state of gloom and despondency, not knowing the reason for her despondency. I wanted to talk, and especially I wanted to ask questions about Dad, but I soon realised the time wasn’t ripe for this.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mum stood on the platform and waved goodbye. Through the windowpane it looked as if her eyes were glistening, flooded with moisture.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When Dad was laid on the cart, I thought he was going to be cold, and soon his face would be twisted into a frozen grimace. But this didn’t happen, and he just went on smiling. I was afraid he might catch pneumonia, but I didn’t dare say anything. I kept silent. A little while later they put someone else beside Dad, someone with a face full of pain, and I was sure this would spoil his mood. It turned out I was wrong here as well because the smile didn’t budge from his face.

The vial of my mother’s tears was broken, and her burning tears scorched the snow at our feet. When the cart had gone and the gate was locked again, I no longer saw my father’s face, just his smile flickering out from a stack of pain.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The American soldiers, astonished by what they saw, wept like little children, but after the first shock they recovered themselves, leapt down from their tanks and began throwing sweets in all directions. There wasn’t a dry spot anywhere; the armour of the tanks and the uniforms of the soldiers were drenched with the tears of the prisoners, whose death-sentence had been commuted to life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mum was very agitated and impatient. She embraced us warmly and kept hold of us a long time. When we alighted from the train, a smiling woman stopped beside us, and turning to Mum, said to her: “You know, lady, your two children are like a pair of flowers.” And Mum watered the flowers with her tears.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Only the suffering God can help.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Behrouz Boochani  ‘No Friend But The Mountains’

Mortality is our fate and I have no choice but to accept and embrace it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When he spoke of his parents, tears welled in his eyes. You can see the painful imprint of their deaths.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The collective trauma from the journey is in our veins – each of those boat odysseys founded a new imagined nation.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The amazement and horror felt during the nights on Manus has the power to thrust everyone back into their long distant pasts. These nights uncover many years of tears deep in our hearts and open old wounds; they plough into every dimension of our existence; they draw out the bitter truth, they force the prisoners to self-prosecute. Prisoners are driven to crying tears of bitter sorrow.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The cubicles are places for screaming out. Or they are marked as chambers of devastation, the devastation of youth who have lost their innocence, a devastation constituted by absolute hopelessness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Adriel Booker ‘Grace Like Scarlett’

Suffering doesn’t choose the weak or the strong, the faithful or faithless. It chooses the human.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

No matter what form it takes, suffering always commands your attention.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Your pain is your pain and it deserves the dignity of recognition, for that is where healing begins.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Naming our suffering doesn’t mean becoming defined by it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Trauma can be the birthplace of revelation.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Jill Briscoe  ‘The One Year Devotions For Women’

Personal grief and sorrow in God’s hands can result in powerful ministry.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

William Brodrick ‘The Sixth Lamentation’

Agnes was strangely composed until the funeral, when her grief broke out like a flood. Then it sank away like a stone beneath flattened water.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I cannot think of that night without seeing the faces of those who stayed behind, trusting in better times when the endless partings would cease. That is my overwhelming feeling of those days, a gradual falling apart, of broken pieces being broken still further.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I know it doesn’t sound so bad to you, seeing the war as you must from its outcome. But for those of us who were there, the fall of Paris, the fall of France, was devastating. From the moment they came and soiled our streets the mourning began. I cannot tell you how dark those times seem to me. And all around the Germans were on holiday…larking about, taking photos.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Lucy was losing her grandmother: the foundations of grief were being hewn out of rock.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The telling seemed to leave him (Lucy’s father – Freddie) winded. He didn’t even know about the friend, never mind the death. To her astonishment he came forward and put an arm around her, drawing her head into his neck. Lucy could not remember when that had happened. She started crying, not for Pascal, not for Agnes, but for herself….and for her father.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said.

‘So am I.’

And they both knew that their words went far deeper than a reference to recent grief. They reached back, further than either of them could ever have intended or imagined, deep into the unlit past.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Geraldine Brooks  ‘Caleb’s Crossing’

There was joy, a moment of sweet festivity, even for those of us who mourned. In this fallen world, such is our condition. Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Octavia E. Butler ‘Parable of the Sower’

Cory cried all day, most of the time without making a sound. She’s been crying off and on since Wednesday. I keep reaching out to her. I don’t know what else to do. Maybe, in time, she’ll be able to forgive me for not being her daughter, for being alive when her son is dead, for being Dad’s daughter by someone else…? I don’t know.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dad never shed a tear. I’ve never seen him cry in my life. Today, I wish he would. I wish he could.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Without warning, I felt a pang of loneliness for the burned neighborhood. It was almost a physical pain. I had been desperate to leave it, but I had expected it still to be there – changed but surviving. Now that it was gone, there were moments when I couldn’t imagine how I was going to survive without it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief hit like that. Something would remind us of the past, of home, of a person, and then we would remember that it was all gone. The person was dead or probably dead. Everything we’d known and treasured was gone. Everything except the three of us. And how well were we doing?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

So today we remembered the friends and the family members we’ve lost. We spoke our individual memories and quoted Bible passages, Earthseed verses, and bits of songs and poems that were favorites of the living or the dead.

Then we buried our dead and we planted oak trees.

Afterward, we sat together and talked and ate a meal and decided to call this place Acorn.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Robyn Cadwallader  ‘The Anchoress’

Tend your grief like hard ground, and wait. One day, something will grow; there won’t be an answer, but you will see you’ve found a way to live, and to live with death.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Robyn Cadwallader  ‘Book of Colours’

He wanted to cry, his chest ached with need, but that was allowed only to the innocent. Grief was forbidden him.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Singing, he discovered, kept the memories away.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Life is arranged for mourning, Mathilda thinks, but not for grief. There are no rituals for these moments in the night when everyone else sleeps and the deeper darkness opens up.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief: she had known it before, but not like this. She sat by Gavin’s (son) bedside watching his sweet face, the slight rise and fall of his chest, gathering it in; she knew this was all she would have of him. When his breath stopped, she wailed her despair, too exhausted and bereft to care when Robert (husband) hushed her. The pain is lodged still in her chest, a constant ache, a presence she would miss if it left her.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

But Robert’s death is so different. It’s two months since he died and she’s surprised at this grief that is more a shadow, or a haunting, than loss. She gropes for the pain in her heart, hopes for tears and sobbing, but they’re not there. Perhaps it was the running and fear, listening to every new noise, planning everyone’s safety, and not just her own. So much to think about that there was no room for crying.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It is objects she realises, things that she can hold and feel, that have marked her way through these past weeks (since her husband’s death)

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She understood: death is so hard and final that it always asks if we could have, should have, done more.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Nick Cave & Sean O’Hagan ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’

It was too close to my son’s death for me to feel anything or to reason clearly.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain – you are taken to the very limits of suffering.

In this dark place, the idea of God feels more present or maybe more essential.

It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined. In grief you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief can have a chastening effect. It makes demands on us. It asks us to be empathetic, to be understanding, to be forgiving, despite our suffering.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We are open to certain ambiguities in life. Dispensing with the rational part of my mind became a strategy for survival, and, as such, a part of the ordinary mechanics of grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When Arthur died it seemed like I had entered a place of acute disorder – a chaos that was also a kind of incapacitation… When you experience sudden loss and grief, you are tested to the extremes of your resilience, but it’s also almost impossible to describe the terrible intensity of that experience. Words just fall away.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you experience loss, it feels like you are ‘capsizing,’ but this point of absolute annihilation, is not exceptional. In fact, it is ordinary, in that it happens to all of us at some time or another.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Stillness is what you crave in grief. When I was alone with my thoughts, there was an almost overwhelming physical feeling coursing through me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

To be forced to grieve publicly, I had to find a means of articulating what had happened. Finding the language became, for me, the way out. There is a great deficit in the language around grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is little headway that we can make around grief until we learn to articulate it – speak it, say it out loud, sing about it, write it down, or whatever. There is no place to speak about grief in our regular lives. It’s just not done.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost, they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate. Other people go the other way and grow open and expansive.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is as ordinary or commonplace as love. We are all part of a great river of humanity, where everyone has suffered loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The experience of grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Susie and I are essentially bound together by love and catastrophe, but there is also the shared project of grief: we both understand what we are going through. and we know how to tread lightly around it and to keep each other afloat.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief can produce an emotional disconnect that is very hard to claw back – a kind of stoppage.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief reinvents us. After trauma, the way we respond to things is altered – we become, as human beings, more precise.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you are grieving you can feel entirely alone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is not just an amorphous fog-like state of being. Grief actively revolves around a point of torture, a moment of realisation, an actual tangible thing.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief gave me a reckless energy. It afforded me a feeling of invincibility and a total disregard for the outcome, a sort of fearless abandonment to destiny. The worst had happened.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief can lead some people to dark places from where they simply never return.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is a gift, a positive force that can become, if we allow it its full expression, a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The bereaved need encouragement to speak sometimes. They are prone to silence because they’re worried about the effect their sadness will have on other people. And this silence becomes habitual, but also builds up like a terrible pressure.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief needs to be measured by action. It’s not so much about working on your feelings. Your feelings come and go… But you need to put some structure and method in your day, as best you can.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief comes and goes, but it no longer scares us. We can collapse together, or apart, in the knowledge that tomorrow we will be back on our feet.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Janet Skeslien Charles ‘The Paris Library’

There was sorrow in her eyes. But was it loss or regret?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

People are awkward, they don’t always know what to do or say. Don’t hold it against them. You never know what’s in their hearts.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We woke to darkness. Mom had always been the one to thrust open the curtains, so I’d wake to a kiss on the forehead and sunlight streaming in. Since the funeral, Dad downed his coffee, and I ate cereal in a gloomy fog. It simply did not occur to us to let in the light.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

At dinner, dad and I barely spoke – the news anchor, our constant companion, did the talking. Our conversations were stilted, and pauses lasted as long as commercial breaks.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The Little Prince

‘It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears’ – the words from a dead aviator comforted me more than trite phrases from folks I knew. ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ The book carried me to another world, to a place that let me forget.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is a sea made of your own tears. Salty swells cover the dark depths you must swim at your own pace. It takes time to build stamina. Some days, my arms sliced through the water, and I felt things would be okay, the shore wasn’t so far off. Then one memory, one moment would nearly drown me, and I’d be back to the beginning, fighting to stay above the waves, exhausted, sinking in my own sorrow.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In silence, Maman and I were steeped in the shock of grief. For how long, I didn’t know.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Tracy Chevalier ‘A Single Thread’

Only a week later they received the telegram about George’s death at Delville Woods. And a year later, Laurence at Passchendaele. He and Violet had not managed to spend more time properly alone together, in a field or a hotel room or even an alley. With each loss she had tumbled into a dark pit, a void opening up inside her that made he feel helpless and hopeless. Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone. It took a long time for the gap to close, if it ever really did.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I grew up in Bradford. During the War I taught embroidery there to convalescent soldiers. Do you know, Miss Speedwell, sewing can be so therapeutic when one has had trauma. The bold colours and the repetition of simple stitches had such a soothing effect on the men. There was something about creating a thing of beauty that worked wonders on their nerves. I was very pleased with the results.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Arthur was silent for a moment. “It is perhaps difficult to understand if you have not had children yourself. The biological imperative of the parent is to protect the child, and when that is impossible it feels like a failure, whatever the circumstances. It is a complicated feeling to live with for the rest of your life.”

“Are you – living with that feeling?”

“Yes. We lost our son.”

“I am so very sorry.” Her words felt as dry as paper, even though she meant them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is nothing worse for a parent than the loss of a child: her mother was having to carry the burden of that grief for the rest of her life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Pat Conroy  ‘South of Broad’

All I remember is that Stephen is golden and beautiful and that our losing him drove a stake into the heart of my family. Somehow we managed to survive that day, but none of us ever experienced the deliverance of recovery. I realise you can walk away from anything but a wounded soul.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

John Cook ‘The Last Lighthouse Keeper’

 Sarah’s heart closed on me and I was on the outside. I hated myself. I despised myself for what I had done to my family. My kids. I rolled over and, for a while, died. I’d never wanted to be responsible for a broken marriage. Especially seeing what it did to children.

But that was it. One pull on the rope, and the whole enormous ship could float away from the harbour. One mistake and everything had come undone. No more bath times and messy breakfasts. No more school art on the fridge. No more little hands in mine.

Now there was one toothbrush in the cup at night. One pair of shoes in the front hall. It was a long time before I stopped hating myself.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

A lighthouse seemed to offer a lifestyle that was the opposite of the life I was currently living. I didn’t feel I could stick around Hobart, orbiting my kid’s lives like a cold moon. Of course, I was wrong, I see that now, but at the time it was all forest.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In parting, everything was taking on a poetic hue, and I found myself parking some evenings outside my kid’s house, watching the light in the windows and the condensation on the bathroom glass from their bath times.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The night before Ashley returned there were storms and rain, nothing to heavy, and I was out on the balcony in the rain and bluster roaring my kid’s names into the storm… Those nights came the way grief comes, with its own patterns and weather. As inexplicable as a storm on a sunny day.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

At this time both Jack’s and Perry’s households would invite me into their homes, but I would often refuse. I had a knot I carried around in me. I soaked it a little in booze some evenings, which loosened it up a bit. And I sat up in bed and lamented my brain, which would not let me sleep.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Tim Costello  ‘Hope’

Profound grief and trauma are complicated states that are not remedied with even the best insights from faith or psychological traditions.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Clifton Crais  ‘History Lessons’

 I grieve for what I cannot remember. It’s a peculiar mourning. Lost childhood remains stubbornly present, its absence an abiding life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Patty Dann  ‘The Butterfly Hours’

Death does that, throws people into each other’s arms.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

A month before Willem’s death, while he was having brain surgery, I fled home from the hospital to do a load of laundry. I had been cleaning throughout his illness, and in many ways, although it did not save him, it is what allowed me to survive.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Carol Deason

The reality of grieving is that your grief won’t be like anyone else.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is as individual as the person grieving.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Joan Didion  ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I had entered at the moment it happened (the sudden death of my husband) a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognisable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterating, dislocating to both body and mind.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as ‘dwelling on it.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life – both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections – have all vanished.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I notice that I have lost the skills of ordinary social encounters, however undeveloped those skills may have been, that I had a year ago.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes a February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of a John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anthony Doerr  ‘About Grace’

After his mother died, he and his father lived together like timid roommates, almost strangers, never touching, speaking softly over meals about nothing important.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Robert Dykstra ‘She Never Said Goodbye’  

Grief is a solitary task. You work at it alone, or with those few companions of your deliberate choice.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Now, years later as I write, my sorrow has slowed down like some worn-out wind-up drummer boy. Sadness fades like an old print; grief yields the right-of-way to my getting on with life; a semblance of promise paints a rosy blush on the distant horizon.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

To claim that all is resolved, that my sorrow has passed away with the morning fogs, that every stab of pain is behind me for good, would be deceitful, foolish.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

One part of her story, ended or not, lingers on and its effects hold to me with tenacious power: the way she went. Her self-destruction made my grief so much more soul-numbing, called me to such deep soul-searching. I bow to its uncomfortable consequence. I shall never know why yet I will never stop asking.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She is gone. Death always comes in the past perfect tense. The action is completed, over and done. And I am alone, desperately alone. The initial shock and stunning unbelief are giving way to the deep abiding sorrow of absence.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief knows that for us to survive we must take on a new identity – a formidable task.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Death strikes with an all-or-nothing finality; it is the non-negotiable transaction that no one barters for; it is the finish of all finishes. The stunning, shuddering, incontrovertible fact pushes us around as a cat does a mouse. Death doesn’t listen to reason, hears no cries for mercy, knows no pity. Sorrow is our only response to its ugly and persistent pressure, our feeble effort to keep living and somehow justify the agony, to understand the unfathomable and senseless.

 • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief makes us wander in a winter desert; causes us to take unmeasured steps, sing out of tune. I find myself so often talking to myself like that desert hermit.

 • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is a noisy business, even when we keep our mouths closed and our tongues still. Grief toils to express itself, verbalising even to the inner self.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Now you are gone; I must learn to walk alone and sleep alone and dream alone.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It is in this present moment – in this my grief-stricken today – against the backdrop of yesterday’s memories that I must wait for the sun to rise tomorrow.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

 My confusion makes up a big chunk of my grief. It is a confusion that keeps asking through the tears: “Why?” “Where does this fit into the grander scheme of things?” “What, if anything, does it all mean?” In this present moment I can’t tolerate life without certainty, experience without knowable cause, and questions without available answers. It’s so confusing.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In grief, life takes the shape of a giant question mark.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is the embrace of death. We can’t escape it. Once someone you truly love dies, your own dying accelerates. More than any other human experience or emotion, grief puts us in touch with our own mortality.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief stands at the interface of life and death.

  • ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Months after the initial stages of my grief, little things began to irritate me. What I felt most strongly about were all the small signs that indicated how quickly people around me had abandoned me to my plight. The support quickly vanished. All I heard was the cordial, non-communicative, ritualistic “How are you?” They didn’t want to know, or at least they hoped I would say “I’m fine” – that would relieve them of the burden. I may be wrong, and at times, I hope so, but my suspicions are that my colleagues and companions are neither prepared nor inclined to offer me the opportunity to bare my soul and pain. So I carry it alone, along with my load of resentment.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief creates its own myriad anniversaries, and then having prised its way into the space of our lives, claims all the times and seasons.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

That crazy delusion that time heals all has me staying awake through endless nights and stumbling like a tottering drunk through empty days.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Death empties us of all our treasures, of everything that fits like an old shoe, of all the landmarks that tell us where we are. Grief is the struggle to find the way when we are far from home.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It takes courage to take charge in one’s grief, but the alternative is to be overcome by it. Resolution has its own price tag and I must be willing to pay that price or I shall be forever paying. Part of that price is the willingness to let go in order to start over again.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Surely there is no special time schedule for any particular grief experience. Everyone is different, each circumstance varies, every episode of loss has its own idiosyncrasies.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dr Edith Eger  ‘The Choice’

When we force our truths and stories into hiding, secrets can become their own trauma, their own prison.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Being a survivor, being a “thriver,” requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or seared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we’re still choosing to be victims.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Memory is sacred ground. But it is haunted too. It’s the place where my rage and guilt and grief go circling like hungry birds scavenging the same old bones.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We don’t yet know the damage we perpetuate by cutting ourselves off from the past, by maintaining our conspiracy of silence. We are convinced that the more securely we lock the past away, the safer and happier we will be.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

No one heals in a straight line.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how we respond to suffering differs.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you grieve, it’s not just over what happened: we grieve for what didn’t happen.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dr Edith Eger ‘The Gift’

All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting a life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is not about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When we have unresolved grief, we often live with overwhelming rage.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Resolving grief means both to release ourselves from responsibility for all the things that weren’t up to us, and to come to terms with the choices we’ve made that can’t be undone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It’s good to keep crying for those we’ve lost, to keep feeling the ache, to let ourselves be in the sorrow and accept that it’s not ever going to go away. But it is also about letting go. About acknowledging the sorrow and joy that coexist in this moment and embracing all of it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief changes, but it doesn’t go away. Denying your grief won’t help you heal – nor will it help to spend more time with the dead than you do with the living.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief has so many layers and flavours: sorrow, fear, relief, survivor’s guilt, existential questioning, diminished safety, fragility. Our whole sense of the world is interrupted and rearranged.  The adage says, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ But I disagree. Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sometimes people compensate for the upheaval of grief by trying to keep everything the same – jobs, routines, and relationships remain static. But when you’ve had a big loss, nothing is the same anymore. Grief can be an invitation to revisit our priorities and decide again – to reconnect to our joy and purpose, recommit to being the best we can be right now, to embrace that life is pointing us in a new direction.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief brings us together, or it pushes us apart. Either way, we are never the same.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief forces us to get clear about what’s my business, what’s your business, and what’s God’s business.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is difficult, but it can also feel good. You can revisit the past. You can even embrace it. You’re not stuck there. You’re here now. And you’re strong.

Choose to live every moment as a gift.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief helps us face and ultimately release what happened or didn’t happen. And it opens up space to see what is and choose where we go from here.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Bernice Eisenstein  ‘I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors’

I was reminded of the tales in Jewish legend about the Lamed-vav, the Unknown Just Men. In every generation, thirty-six men are chosen by God to carry the sorrows of the world. Ordinary men; indistinguishable from other men; unknown to one another.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Nicholas Evans  ‘The Loop’

The loss of a child is an abyss from which few families return. Some claw their way again toward the light, perhaps finding a narrow ledge where in time, memory can shed its skin of pain. Others dwell in darkness forever.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The Calder’s found a kind of nether twilight though each by a different route. The boys death seemed to act on the family with a force that was centrifugal. They could find no comfort in collaborative mourning. Like shipwrecked strangers, they each struck out for shore alone, as if fearful that in helping others they might be dragged beneath the waves of grief and drown.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Richard Paul Evans  ‘A Step of Faith’

Grief isn’t a luxury; it is an appropriate response to loss. You just don’t will it away. If you allow it to run its course, it will fade with time, but if you ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist, it only gets worse.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Richard Paul Evans  ‘Finding Noel’

I’ve wondered why it is that some people come through difficult times bitter and broken while others emerge stronger and more empathetic? I’ve read that the same breeze that extinguishes some flames just fans others.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Richard Paul Evans  ‘The Christmas Box’

They say that time heals all wounds. But even as wounds heal they leave scars, token reminders of the pain.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Michel Faber ‘The Book of Strange New Things’

There can be moments in a person’s life when grief over the loss of a loved one is stronger than faith.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sebastian Faulks   ‘Where My Heart Used To Beat’

Watching a parent die is one of the great trials of life: the only thing to be said for it is that it is unrepeatable.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dr. Kelly Flanagan 

The art of being alive is realising fear is just grief waiting to happen.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Francoise Frenkel ‘A Bookshop in Berlin’

I was left all alone.

I had bought a book with me and I tried to read. But I could not focus my thoughts. I was surrounded by a muffled silence, interrupted by the last of the birdsong and the humming of insects. I listened, and watched night descend over the forest; the last rays of sunshine painted the tops of the trees gold; the sound of voices floated over from distant houses; little by little, the birdsong faded away.

Night came and enveloped me like a shroud. The silence was broken by soft noises, scarcely perceptible: leaves, twigs, pinecones dropping from the trees. A bird brushed past a branch with its wing, an insect climbed the trunk of a tree and fell back to the ground. The wind seemed to whisper in the foliage. All these noises took on sinister implications. The barking of a dog on some unknown farm sounded almost like the voice of a friend.

Suddenly, I was struck by the cold and I huddled under my coat and blankets. I tried to sleep, but to no avail. I tried to conjure up a comforting thought. But what? My beloved mother was far far away; I had had no news of her or any of my family for two years; the whole world was stained by the blood of war. Everywhere, loss and despair.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘Stand up, madame, you are not injured. I saw the Italian shoot into the air,’ said the soldier in French as he helped me to my feet.

‘Where am I?’

‘Come, now! You are in Switzerland, aren’t you?’

I was in Switzerland, I was saved!

I started to walk, while trying to staunch the blood that was flowing freely from my legs and hands. At the same time, I tried to rearrange my ripped clothes.

All at once, the tension drained from me.

I was crying…. Quietly, the tears I had for so long held back started to flow… they felt like a hot spring flooding my face. I swallowed those bitter tears and, as I wept, I felt a crushing weight lift.

The Swiss soldier walked discreetly on ahead of me, carrying the pitiable bundle of belongings that had been my companion on my successive attempts to flee. In it was everything I had taken with me from France, save my grieving and deathly tired heart…

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Patrick Gale   ‘Notes From An Exhibition’

Quakers do have something very special to offer the dying and the bereaved, namely that we are at home in silence. Not only are we thoroughly used to it and unembarrassed by it but we know something about sharing it, encountering others in its depths and, above all, letting ourselves be used in it…You don’t get over sorrow; you work your way right to the centre of it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief was a kind of illness, he maintained, and ran a course as predictable as measles or a common cold. Its fever always abated, given time and management, leaving the luckier among them with scars where love had been.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Laurie Burrows Grad

The grief we feel has its own voice and should not be compromised by comparisons.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Airdre Grant  ‘Stumbling Stones: A Path Through Grief, Love, and Loss’

I had forgotten how grief walks alongside, sits on your shoulders. At any time your proud little house of cards can tumble down.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The whole business of grief and loss is a mess. It can start badly and end who knows how or when.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Whatever way you come to it, the journey through grief is long and unpredictable. The only way through it is through it. There are no shortcuts. The more you step into it the better. Avoidance only brings it back more strongly later on.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We are issued a challenge, one that can feel unbearable, unreasonable and hateful. Yet the challenge is that we must survive and, even more, if possible, survive to be richer and stronger. Our loss never leaves and maybe, just maybe, we gain in ways we never knew would nourish our wounded hearts.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Memory is not always sacred and reverent. Loss can keep us frozen in a place of resentment or pain. It can continue to wound.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief and mourning have no timetable. You may think you are okay and then, suddenly, you know you are not.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

If grief is the price we pay for love, would any of us wish to be spared the opportunity to know that sweeping, deep, rich feeling of trust and affection?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The consolations of grief are not obvious. The gift of heightened awareness of the value of life, of the preciousness of love, the importance of ritual – these are not things that spring to mind when we are sorrowful and desolate with suffering.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The affliction of grief is a sacred place, ways of knowing and acting are all upside down and there are opportunities you may not normally be able to see. Although your heart may have been torn open, there is love everywhere when you are awake in all your senses.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Amy Grant  ‘Mosaics’

In our lives, the darkest times, the days that are bleak and black add depth to every other experience. Like the dark bits of colour in a mosaic, they add the contrast and the shadows that give beauty to the whole, but they are just a small part of the big picture.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I’ve heard that five years is the average marker for some semblance of normalcy following a tragedy. Five years after a divorce, five years after an accident, five years after a death – the present reality, the new reality, has a chance to stand on its own without being overshadowed by the past. I can say this, not because she ever said so herself, but because now that I’m in my late forties I’ve done enough grieving and healing myself to understand the process over the years. I’ve pieced together the impact of Uncle Larry’s death and how it has reverberated through generations.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Miriam Greenspan  ‘Healing Through the Dark Emotions’

Grief has a tremendous power. When we submerge it in avoidance, we can’t use it for spiritual growth. Allow grief’s power to propel you.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Marianne Griebler

It’s only when we name our grief that it can begin to transform us instead of numbing us.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Philip Gulley ‘Healing Through The Seasons’

I consider it a mystery how mourning can turn some people soft and others hard. I am acquainted with certain people whose grief immersed them in the holy. But I know others whose suffering tore a spiritual cleft between them and the divine, folks whose faith died right along with their loved one. Sometimes when we most need faith it seems to flee into the night.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Chris Hammer  ‘Scrublands’

There is nothing to indicate what occurred here almost a year ago… the most traumatic event in the town’s history and nothing to mark it. Nothing for the victims, nothing for the bereaved.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Fran lets out a sob… It comes from somewhere deep inside, racking her chest before escaping, the release of something long suppressed.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The day my family died, the day the truck went off the road at Bellington, was the day my life stopped. The truck killed my wife Jessica and it killed my boy Jonny. And it killed me inside. It still hurts; thirty years on it still hurts. (Codger Harris – the bank manager later recluse)

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Kent Haruf  ‘Benediction’

She shook her head and went out to the backyard. They watched her through the window. She walked slowly into the shade under the tree and they watched her bend far over and touch the ground and lower herself onto her knees, wrapping herself in her arms, and now they could see she was crying, the top of her white head on the grass.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Peter Heller  ‘The Painter’

Grief is an engine. Feels like that. It does not fade, what they say, with time. Sometimes it accelerates.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Some creeks you simply loved, and seeing the railroad sign with the craggy gorge reminded me that we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you’re not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I was not myself that whole spring. I know what it means when they say ‘beside yourself’ with grief. That’s what it felt like. Like I was standing a few feet away from my body as I went through the motions. Remote. From my feelings, from a clear view of anything.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I swallowed the grief this time Took a deep breath, wiped my face with my sleeve and thought.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Robert Hillman ‘The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted’

He had never wept in his life but these days his cheeks were tear-streaked all the time. When he noticed, he would shrug: what did it matter?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘Dear God!’ he said under his breath. So much was ruined. When his father died it was like this. So much ruined. A healthy man who strode about like a king killed in a week by a sickness that didn’t even have a proper name. Tom looked up at the hills and said again, ‘Dear God!’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Tom had expected that he would feel relief when his wife finally decided to leave him a second time. Instead, a burden of sadness settled on his heart.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Her grief for Leon came in one huge gulp. She was not ready to grieve for Michael.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She would have wept if that were possible, but it wasn’t; nobody wept in Auschwitz after the first month.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Her father had listened to the news on the radio at the apartment in Pest near the Chain Bridge, Hannah and her sister Mitzi, a year older, beside him on the sofa. ‘They are burning book. Why this madness? The students are burning books.’ He’d wrung his hands and pushed his thumb against his wedding ring as he did at times of distress. Hannah had closed her own hands over his and calmed him. Silver showed in the stubble on his cheeks and chin and the round lenses of his spectacles had misted over. His lips moved silently. A prayer of forgiveness, as Hannah guessed; her father went through life dispensing forgiveness even when it was especially uncalled for.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The boys were older than her son had been before Auschwitz, but in one child here and another there, she noticed mannerisms that brought him back with uncanny force and detail. On those days, a bleakness like the coldest day of a cold winter marched into her heart and her blood flowed like a torpid ooze.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anthony & Ben Holden (editors)  ‘Poems That Make Grown Men Cry’

Douglas Kennedy: ‘After Great Pain’ – Emily Dickinson

In the United States we are in love with one of the more specious words in the modern lexicon – closure. The word is employed whenever the spectre of tragedy has cast its shadow on a life. ‘I need to achieve closure’ is a common lament in the wake of profound grief. Yet lurking behind this proclamation is the equally spurious belief that the horrors which life can wreak upon us – and which we can also wreak upon ourselves – can be eventually placed in a box, put on a shelf and shut away forever.

Dickinson not only speaks volumes about the shadowland of despair that is the price of being given the gift of life, but also reminds us of one of the central truths with which we grapple: to live is to harbour so many profound losses.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Joe Klein: ‘The Remorseful Day’ – A. E. Housman

The poem remains, a reminder of grief so pure that it can also cleanse.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Al Alvarez: ‘Dream Song 90: Op. posth., no.13’ – John Berryman

‘heavy with grief’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Paul Bettany: ‘Armada’ – Brian Patten

Armada

Long, long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child’ armada.

A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines –
all came to ruin and we’re on flame
in that dusk-red pond.

And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.

How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond’s cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I’m touching;
for as on a pond a child’s paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart burns as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Brian Houston  ‘Live, Love, Lead’

Grief is a hard road and one that is not to be diminished.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Vicki Hutchinson  ‘Death by Choice’

Philip’s suicide on top of nursing my mother and father until their death has left me a changed person. I am not sure if I am repairable. I have felt like a strong and powerful person for most of my life. Currently, I am not feeling so resilient.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The suffering of the one who decides to take their own life then becomes suffering for those left behind.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Kazuo Ishiguro  ‘Never Let Me Go’

I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading to never let go. That is what I saw.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Rachel Joyce  ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’

He felt nothing but anguish for the things that couldn’t be undone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Though it had cleft them apart and plunged them into separate darkness, their son had after all done what he wanted.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Rachel Joyce ‘The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey’

Maybe the family had changed when they got the news. Maybe they felt the need to inhabit their grief. After my father’s death, my mother gave up eating meat. But why? I asked. She’d always loved meat. Because her life was torn in half, she said.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I’d made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow you.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I made a place for each of them (in my sea garden) because they had been a part of my life, and even though they were gone I would not leave them behind.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In bed that night, I lay fully clothed with my arms clamped round my knees and my feet tucked up high. No matter how many layers I added, I could not stop shuddering. When I closed my eyes, all I could picture was David, blue in the dark, swinging from the beam of your garden shed.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you share, you see that your own sorrow is not so big or special. You are only another person feeling sad.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Rachel Joyce  ‘Perfect’

He couldn’t understand how everything was continuing as before. It was an ordinary morning except that it wasn’t. Time had been splintered.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The pain in his foot is as nothing compared to this other wound that is deep inside. There is no atoning for the past. There are only the mistakes that have been made.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There was no avoiding the pain of grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It was the same with time, he thought, and also sorrow. They were both waiting to catch you. And no matter how much you shook your arms at them and hollered, they knew they were bigger. They knew they would get you in the end.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He had cried so long and uncontrollably he forgot to stop.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It was an accident, the policeman said to Andrea. He didn’t even lower his voice as if grief rendered the bereaved deaf.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

After her death, Seymour seemed to lose his balance. Some days he said nothing. Some days he raged. He flew through the house shouting, as if his anger alone was enough to make his wife come back.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Time would heal, Mrs Sussex said. Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub. He didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she had never been there.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

Marjan Kamali ‘The Stationary Shop of Tehran’

The pain over Bahman and the death of Mr. Fakhri had been so raw at first; Roya felt like her skin had been torn off. But over time, in place of the exposed skin, a veneer had formed. By the time she boarded the plane, Roya was aware of her skin and bones and eyes and limbs, but her heart was locked away…Her heart would be closed off, this she promised herself.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

Marigold was pronounced dead forty-three minutes after their arrival at the hospital.

On the linoleum floor, beneath the fluorescent lights, Roya’s legs went numb. The doctor’s voice was garbled. He was speaking through mud. Just like when she’d first arrived in America, English was incomprehensible. Beside her stood Walter; he hovered next to her, tall and silent, and in her peripheral vision she saw his huge hands shaking. Alice was diagonally across from her; everything about her mother-in-law was motionless except for her tears.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

She missed more than anything else Marigold’s face against hers. Her grief would know no end, of this she was sure.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

In their grief, husband and wife slowly achieved a new equilibrium. They padded around each other carefully at first, and then with more spontaneity because, as it was said, life somehow went on.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

Roya and Walter were united in pain. He spent every night drinking in the rocking chair before bed. She retreated into her shell. Ice frozen over a melted layer is even harder to break than before.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

For every ounce of grief that she had, Walter had the same. He had laboured with her in this grief, felt his way through the darkness and the depth of it, and all the time as the world carried on, he was there by her side.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

And then cancer had wiped her mother from the world and Claire felt desperately, inexplicably, painfully, permanently alone. No mom to come home to, call on the phone, cook a favourite dish with. No mom to tell her that everything would be all right.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

Trauma and loss never went away – of course those memories had always been with her. But now she cried like she hadn’t cried in years, not since the early years after Marigold died. She was grieving all over again for something she thought she had finished with years ago.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••      ••••••

Hannah Kent  ‘Burial Rites’

I wake every morning with a blow of grief to my heart.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

David Kessler

There is not a typical response to loss as there is no typical loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

David Kessler ‘Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief’

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ‘The Five Stages of Grief’

Denial: shock and disbelief that the loss has occurred

Anger: that someone we love is no longer here

Bargaining: all the what-ifs and regrets

Depression: sadness from the loss

Acceptance: acknowledging the reality of the loss

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The five stages were never intended to be descriptive. They don’t prescribe, they describe. Each person grieves in his or her own unique way. Nonetheless, the grieving process does tend to unfold in stages similar to what we described.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is a crucial sixth stage to the healing process: meaning. Through meaning we can find more than pain. Loss can wound and paralyse. It can hang over us for years. But finding meaning in loss empowers us to find a path forward. Meaning helps us make sense of grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is extremely powerful. It’s easy to get stuck in your pain and remain bitter, angry, or depressed.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”  Erich Fromm

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

If you love, you will one day know sorrow. Love and grief come as a package deal.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is the experience and natural feelings that come with loss. Some deaths are traumatic when they are accompanied by exposure to the loved one’s physical agony, medical procedures, suddenness. Trauma always has grief mixed in, but not all grief is traumatic.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In our hyper busy world, grief has been minimised and sanitised.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief should unite us. It is a universal experience.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Too often outsiders who may have the best intentions will suggest to a bereaved person that it’s time to move on, embrace life, and let go of grief. But grief should be a no-judgment zone. Those who understand what you are going through will never judge you or think your grief is out of proportion or too prolonged. Grief is what’s going on inside of us, while mourning is what we do on the outside. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey. It does not have prescribed dimensions and it does not end on a certain date.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Some people are expressive. Others shy away from their feelings. Some have more feelings. Some have less. Some are more productive and practical in their grieving style. They have a ‘buckle down and move on’ mentality. We can mistakenly think that people who show no visible signs of pain should be in a grief group, getting in touch with and sharing their feelings. But if that is not their style in life, it won’t be in grief, either. They must experience loss in their own way. Suggesting otherwise will not be helpful to them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Every loss has meaning, and all losses are to be grieved – and witnessed. “If the love is real, the grief is real.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Something goes out of alignment when we try to avoid sadness and grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The death shapes the grief. If we are mourning a more problematic death, we are likely to have a more complicated grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In grief, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Pain is the pure emotion we feel when someone we love dies. The pain is part of the love. Suffering is the noise our mind makes around that loss, the false stories it tells because it can’t conceive of death as random.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The first step in finding meaning is the fifth stage of grief: acceptance. We don’t like loss. We will never be OK with it, but we must accept it, even in its brutality, and, in time, acknowledge the reality of it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In grief, we often entangle the past, present, and future. We need to come into the present moment, so we are getting our meaning from the now, not the then.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you are stuck in grief, the best way forward is to help another person in grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When people grieve a death by suicide, they are inevitably haunted by their failure to have stopped it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. Lose a child and you are…nothing.’  Tennessee Williams

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The question of blame – very often self-blame – comes up with particular urgency when a child has died. Parents feel responsible for everything that happens to their children. Any grieving parent is likely to have haunting, guilt-ridden, late-night thoughts that boil down to, ‘If I had been a better parent, my child would still be alive.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is on the inside, and mourning is on the outside.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Parents have different experiences of grief. No one way of dealing with grief is less legitimate than another.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Moving on is scary because it can feel like you’re losing the child all over again. How do we put a time limit on grief? We don’t. Most bereaved parents don’t understand how many treacherous land mines there are after this kind of loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The word ‘bereaved’ has its origins in the Old English words deprived of, seized, and robbed. This is how it feels when your loved one has been taken from you – as excruciating as if your arm had been ripped from your body. You’ve been robbed of what is dearest to you. The pain you feel is proportionate to the love you had. The deeper you loved, the deeper the pain. But you will find that love exists on the other side of the pain. It’s actually the other face of pain.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief may get postponed, but it cannot be eradicated. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I want grieving people to see the relevance in all that has happened. There is pain in their loss, but there is also good.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘grief bursts’ – being unexpectedly overwhelmed with feelings of loss

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Remaining connected to your loved one in grief is not ‘unhealthy grieving.’ It’s normal.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It is your job to honour your own grief. No one else can ever understand it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sue Monk Kidd ‘The Book of Longings’

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all. I swore an oath to set down their accomplishments and praise their flourishing, no matter how small. I would be a chronicler of lost stories.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I asked myself why the prospect of losing thirteen scrolls, two vials of ink, two reed pens, three clean sheets of papyrus, and a bowl set off such desperation in me. Only now do I see the immensity I assigned to these objects. They not only represented those fragile stories I wanted to preserve. They also held the full weight of my craving to express myself, to lift out of my small self, out of the enclosure of my life, and find what lay beyond. I wanted for so much.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She laid the child on the pillow. She was tiny as a kitten. Her lips lapis blue. Her stillness terrible.

“Life will be life and death will be death,” I whispered, and with those words, grief filled the empty place in me where the baby had lain. I would carry it there like a secret all the days of my life.

“Do you wish to bestow a name on her? Yaltha asked.

I looked at my daughter lying wilted on the pillow. “Susanna,” I said. The name meant lily.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I was grateful for my solitude. It gave me time to mourn. I slept with grief and woke to it. It was always there, a black strap around my heart. I didn’t ask God why my daughter died. I knew he couldn’t help it. Life was life, death was death. It was the fault of no one.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The following day, Yaltha came to my room carrying the broken pieces of a large clay pot in the folds of her robe.

“Child,” Yaltha said, for even though I was a woman, she still sometimes called me by her pet name. “There’s no worse feeling than one’s breasts filled with milk and no one to suckle.”

The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too. One day had never come. I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“Your brother stood right there in the doorway and said I should give up my perverse craving to write and give myself to prayer and grief for my daughter. Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don’t grieve?”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I stacked the used pieces of clay into wobbly towers along the walls of the room. Little pillars of grief. They didn’t take away my sorrow, but they gave me a way to make what meaning I could from it. To write again felt like a return to myself.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.

The grief in me could be unbearable at times, and I felt it now… pain so cutting, I wondered if I could go on standing.

If I bore my grief by writing words, Jesus bore his by praying them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

For nearly two years, I’d worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find – my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn’t shed.

A great tiredness came over me then. I closed my eyes, wanting the dark empty void.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sue Monk Kidd  ‘The Secret Life of Bees’

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sought of heartbreak is happening.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Barbara Kingsolver  ‘Prodigal Summer’

‘I lost a child,’ she said, meeting Lusa’s eyes directly. ‘I thought I wouldn’t live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind you.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The potted ferns were turning brown, as brittle and desolate as her internal grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Suddenly she felt so exhausted by grief that she had to sink into a chair and put her head down on the table.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I grew up in a family where suffering was quiet.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

His body was no longer to be looked upon. If the thought caused him sadness – that he would never again know the comfort of human touch – he sensed it was merely a tributary to the lake of grief through which an old man must swim at the end of his days.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She felt an enormous sadness inside her waking up. Sometimes it slept, and she could pretend at life, but then it would rise and crowd out anything else she might try to be, hounding her with the hundred simple ways she could have saved him.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The moon was high now, and smaller, and she felt her grief shrinking with it. Or not shrinking, never really changing, but ceding some of its dominance over the landscape, exactly like the moon.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

What worse grief can there be than to be old without young ones to treasure, coming up after you?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

After her husband’s death Lusa discovered lawnmower therapy. The engine’s vibrations roaring through her body and its thunderous noise in her ears seemed to bully all human language from her head, chasing away the complexities of regret and recrimination.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The world grows quickly impatient with grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The forest had seemed large enough for her grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Barbara Kingsolver  ‘Unsheltered’

She felt at a loss to console him as he waded through his swamp of grief, hour by hour, as she watched from the outside.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief takes energy. I still feel like I’m hiking uphill after losing Mama.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

At his last checkup the paediatrician had observed the howling red face and trembling limbs, and said that infants process grief as trauma.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

This kid could wail for hours. His grip on wakefulness must have been powered by a fear of loss. In his world, the minute you closed your eyes, a mother could vanish.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Maybe it was that simple: in a life of loss, people tossed and turned. They cried.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“I forgot. She gave this to me, I don’t know, ten years before she died. I didn’t want to think about her funeral. So I stuck it in a box, and I completely and absolutely forgot. It’s one of the only things she ever asked me to do for her, and I didn’t do it.” This grief ran so deep Willa could hardly name it. Not just for her mother’s loss, or the funeral that wasn’t perfect. She’d failed to keep order.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ronald J. Knapp  ‘Beyond Endurance – When a Child Dies’

Shadow grief reveals itself more in the form of an emotional “dullness”, where the person is unable to respond fully and completely to outer stimulation and where normal activity is moderately inhibited. It is characterised as a dull ache in the background of one’s feelings that remains fairly constant and that, under certain circumstances and on certain occasions, comes bubbling to the surface, sometimes in the form of tears, sometimes not, but always accompanied by a feeling of sadness and a mild sense of anxiety. Shadow grief will vary in intensity depending on the person and the unique factors involved. It is more emotional for some than for others.

Whenever shadow grief exists, the individual can never remember the events surrounding the loss without feeling some kind of emotional reaction, regardless of how mild. The difference between “normal” grief and “shadow” grief is similar to the difference between pneumonia and the common cold. The latter is less serious, less disruptive to life, more of a nuisance than anything else.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Christopher Koch  ‘The Memory Room’

But all weeping stops in the end, leaving us merely empty. We’re not able to bear these emotions that match the size of our great calamities; were they to grow to their true size, they would consume us. Instead, we take refuge in blankness: the same weary blankness that children know when they cease to cry. And, in fact, we return to childishness, after such weeping, and look about us for comfort, or at least an escape. But unlike children, we find no comfort: only the refuge of numbness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

David R. Kopacz

The struggle to live with a shattered heart is a lonely and isolated place to be.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

James P. Krehbiel

Your attitude and compassion are more important than the words that are spoken.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dr Louis E. Lagrand  ‘Healing Grief, Finding Peace’

Death shatters our illusion that we are actually in control. Grief has always been an experience that presents the opportunity to redefine ourselves and our world and find new meaning, value and vision for our lives.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

How we grieve depends on the complex nature of our relationship to the loved one and our past experience with loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is the normal inner response to the loss of a valued person or object. It usually, though not always, includes a host of emotions like anger, guilt, depression or despair, denial, feelings of failure, and feeling misunderstood by friends and family.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is not only a necessary, ongoing process, a release, and repositioning – but it causes us to pause and learn. Be open to the new and unfamiliar. Be open to mystery and the unexpected.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The myth with the longest-lasting and most hurtful consequences is this: you must let go and sever ties to the deceased, find closure, and get on with life. Closure usually implies closing the door of memories and the relationship. Not possible.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief has different rhythms and intensities.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is a series of new beginnings.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Olivia Laing  ‘Crudo’

What had happened to her mother is that she had checked into a slightly rundown once quite exclusive still pretty nice hotel, tipped the bellboy, chatted to the night staff and then OD’d in the bedroom, not paying the bill. Kathy had spent maybe two days maybe two weeks hysterical, calling all the hospitals, trying to track down before the rest of the family thought to tell her. They were the kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief saturates her words, she can’t stop it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Tara J. Lal  ‘Standing On My Brother’s Shoulders’

Jo and Adam were opposites. Grief and loss served only to accentuate the difference in their personalities. We had all lost the same person, yet our perceptions of that loss and the way we experienced the emptiness differed greatly.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It was as if floating in our individual spheres of grief, we each held onto a small branch, which connected us and prevented us floating entirely alone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

….a dam burst inside me, releasing an unstoppable tsunami of grief. Pulsating howls! Raw pain!

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I had to live through those days, feeling the pain, in order to start the healing. That way, I could begin a fragile and tenuous reconnection to life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Inside the house, Dad and I lived separately, individual bodies of pain. We never touched; we never shared our grief with one another. It was simply too painful.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief comes in waves, healing comes in inches.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The ability to show emotion with honesty forms the foundation of connection. The bond came through showing my vulnerability, not hiding it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is no clean and tidy end to grief. It is not like a cut that heals when new skin grows, leaving no trace. Grief has a rhythm, abating at times when other things hold your attention, but always reappearing. It is like a mountain range undulating and unfolding before you as you navigate a path along it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is no end to grief: it is not linear; there is no finish line, no destination to be reached. There is no time frame.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The deeper the grief, the greater the opportunity for learning.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anne Lamott ‘Almost Everything: Notes on Hope’

Parents are blown over by the death of a child – how can they not be? – and their roots barely stay in the shifting soil. Little by little, nature pulls us back, back to growing. This is life. We are life.

So little bits of life and grace, time, habits, duties, a phone call, more time, all filter into the seed under the concrete. And that seed pushes up through, no matter what, because this is how life is constructed – to live.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The absence of a loved one due to death will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptise, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anne Lamott   ‘Small Victories’

Grief is not something to be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place. Only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I am no longer convinced that you’re supposed to get over the death of certain people, but little by little, I started to feel a sense of reception. I was beginning to let the finality enter me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anne Lamott

If you haven’t already, you will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is the good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life; you dance to the minuet of old friendships.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Michael Leunig

Dear God,

Give comfort and peace to those who are separated

from loved ones. May the ache in our hearts be the

strengthening of our hearts. May our longing bring resolve

to our lives, conviction and purity to our love.

Teach us to embrace our sadness lest it turn into despair.

Transform our yearning into wisdom.

With the passage of time, let our hearts grow fonder.

Amen

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Christy Lefteri ‘The Beekeeper of Aleppo’

One night, late in the summer, vandals destroyed the hives. They set fire to them, and by the time we got to the apiaries in the morning they were burned to char. The bees had died and the field was black. I will never forget the silence, that deep, never-ending silence. Without the cloud of bees above the field, we were faced with a stillness of light and sky. In that moment, as I stood at the edge of the field where the sun was slanting across the ruined hives, I had a feeling of emptiness, a quiet nothingness that entered me every time I inhaled.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘It’s just that…’ The young woman hesitated. ‘It’s just that I lost my son too. It’s just that…I know. I know what it’s like. The void. It’s black like the sea.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is an expression on her face I recognise from years ago, and it makes my sadness feel like something palpable, like a pulse, but it makes me afraid too, afraid of fate and chance and hurt and harm, of the randomness of pain, how life can take everything from you all at once…

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I never thought I would be sitting down somewhere, next to other families, drinking coffee, without the sound of bombs, without the fear of snipers. It was at this time, when the chaos stopped, that I thought of Sami. Then there was guilt, for being able to taste the coffee.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Dahab is very unhappy, Nuri. She was trying to stay strong for Aya, but since I arrived here she has been lying down all day with the lights switched off, holding on to a photograph of Firas. Sometimes she cries, but most of the time she is silent. She will not talk about him. All she says is that she is happy that I am by her side now.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

C. S. Lewis  ‘A Grief Observed’

For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Gordon Livingston M.D.  ‘Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart’

Grief has taught me many things about the fragility of life and the finality of death. To lose that which means the most to us is a lesson in helplessness and humility and survival.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Like all who mourn I learned an abiding hatred for the word “closure,” with its comforting implication that grief is a time-limited process from which we all recover. The idea that I could reach a point when I could no longer miss my children was obscene to me and I dismissed it. I had to accept the reality that I would never be the same person, that some part of my heart, perhaps the best part, had been cut out and buried with my sons.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

What I learned about grief is that there is no way around it, you just have to go through it. In that journey I experienced hopelessness, contemplated suicide, and learned that I was not alone. Certain that there could be no comfort in words, I came to realise that words, my own and those of others, were all I had to frame my experience, first my despair and finally a fragile belief that my life still had meaning.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Some form of forgiveness is the end point of grieving.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Patricia Lockwood ‘No One is Talking About This’

Grief must belong to its own circle of time.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Some people were etched transparent, lovely in their grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

James McBride ‘The Color of Water’

I didn’t know what death was. My family didn’t talk of death. You weren’t allowed to say the word. The old-time Jews, they’d spit on the floor when they said the word ‘death’ in Yiddish.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mommy’s tears (in church) seemed to come from somewhere else, a place far away, a place inside her that she never let any of us children visit, and even as a boy I felt there was pain behind them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ma cried, and she wailed and wailed, the sound of her cries circling the house like a spirit and settling on all the corridors and beds where we lay, weeping in silence.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

For months after my stepfather died, Mommy walked around the house as if she were blind, staggering through the motions of life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mommy played each note of her favorite hymn (What a Friend We Have in Jesus) separately, as if they had no connection to each other, and they echoed through the house and landed on the walls like tears. I couldn’t stand to hear it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It took about ten years for Mommy to recover from my stepfather’s death. It wasn’t just that her husband was suddenly gone, it was the accumulation of a lifetime of silent suffering, some of which my siblings and I never knew about.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mommy could not grasp exactly what to do next, but she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did. She ran, as she had done most of her life, but this time she was running for her own sanity.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She was spinning in crazy circles only because she was trying to survive, and movement was always her modus operandi when things got tough.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The bus pulled off and she was out of sight for a moment, but after we turned the corner, I saw her from the window across the aisle and she had broken down. She was leaning on the wall beneath the train trestle, head bowed, one hand squeezing her eyes, as if the tears that flowed out of them could be squeezed into oblivion.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I can still hear her weeping now sometimes. I know the exact sound of it, like a note you hear or a song that keeps spinning around in your head, and you can’t forget it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Part of me died when Dennis died.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

A penetrating loneliness covered me, lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face. I had no tears to shed. They were done long ago, but a new pain and a new awareness were born inside me. The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate…. My own humanity was awakened, rising up to greet me with a handshake…. There’s such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anthony McCarten  ‘Darkest Hour’

On the evening of 22 August, Marigold regained consciousness for long enough to ask her mother to sing ‘Bubbles,’ her favourite song… She died the next morning with her parents at her side. Winston later told his daughter Mary that ‘Clementine in her agony gave a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain.’
It was a pain that would never leave them but was rarely spoken of. In true stiff-upper-lip fashion, Mary Soames describes how her mother ‘did not indulge in her grief, rather she battened it down, and got on with life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ian McEwan  ‘The Children Act’

The question undid her. She let out a terrible sound, a smothered howl…. And she began to weep, at last, standing by the fire, her arms hanging hopelessly at her sides, while he watched, shocked to see his wife, always so self-contained, at the furthest extremes of grief. She was beyond speech and the crying would not stop and she could not bear any longer to be seen.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

William McInnes ‘Christmas Tales’

I felt a little unsure about myself, for some things mean as much as they did back in the day.

Back in the day.

I told my son that Christmas in July party we attended wasn’t long after my son’s brother had beeen born, perfect in every way but never to breathe. How when he was placed in his mother’s arms, I had never seen her look more beautiful.

It was very hard, I said, a very hard time for it was so sad. And that day is important to remember because of the things that happened….

Of how, at a time of sadness, kindness is offered in many different ways but no matter how it is offered it is welcomed utterly and without equivocation.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Fiona McIntosh ‘The Pearl Thief’

My mother was lost to her grief. She had to be held by us just to stand… Her heart was broken and I think everything else about her began to fail. She rarely smiled again. We never heard her pretty voice sing lullabies. The woman I knew as the mother I adored and who loved every bit of me – all of us – began to disappear. Little by little we lost her, a fraction more each day, until within a couple of years she was a skeleton, clothed in living flesh that resembled my mother but nothing of that person was left. Her spirit had fled, perhaps to join Petr.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mal McKissock & Dianne McKissock  ‘Coping With Grief’

The experience of grief in response to loss is known to all human beings regardless of age, gender, creed or culture.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is a subjective experience and most of us feel little benefit in being told there is someone worse off than ourselves.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In the first year many people describe grief as ‘coming in waves’, often at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We don’t ‘get over’ grief – it just changes shape and intensity as we learn how to live in the physical absence of the person or persons we love.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief affects every part of us – body, mind and spirit. It is common for the bereaved to experience symptoms of the condition which caused the person’s death, even if that was an accident.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

People often experience grief as a void, a disfiguration – ‘like a part of me has gone.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is dynamic and ever-changing – in shape and intensity- determined by everything the bereaved was before this event, the nature of their relationship with the deceased, their physical and emotional health, age, and the environment in which they live.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Death is almost always experienced as sudden, no matter how much warning we have. Grief is still grief, and usually no less raw because of foreknowledge.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is a natural, healthy and painful response to loss of anyone or anything we value dearly. We grieve as we have lived.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief cannot be fixed or the process shortened. Most of us learn how to live full and rewarding lives, despite the pain that remains with us forever, although in changed form and intensity.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is not a problem to be solved; it is the effect of a significant loss on every part of our being.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The loneliness of grief is hard to describe – a feeling that seems to go to the very core of our being. As hard as it might be to imagine, the intensity and constancy of these feelings will not last forever. Grief will change – not be ‘cured’.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Learning to live with grief is largely about the ‘art of distraction’. Whenever we are experiencing emotional pain, it is helpful to stay with it long enough to understand its source, express whatever we need to in whatever way feels right, then distract ourselves by doing something physical that restores normal breathing. Choose an activity that would normally give you pleasure – something that draws attention into the external world, away from the dark emptiness and loneliness of the internal world.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Hugh Mackay  ‘The Good Life’

The truth is that we will learn nothing from our sadness, our suffering, our disappointments or our failures unless we give ourselves time to experience them to the full, reflect on them, learn from them or, in modern parlance, process them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Michelle Magorian  ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’

In his grief he had cut himself off from people and when he had recovered he had lost the habit of socialising.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It’s the wounds inside that will take the longest to heal.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

After they had drunk their tea Geoffrey put the teapot on the mantle piece above the fire. Beside it, he placed a photograph of two young men with their arms around each other. They seemed to be laughing a great deal. In front of the teapot he laid his pipe.

‘Those are your subjects for this afternoon.’

Will recognised one of the young men as Geoffrey. ‘Who’s the other man?’ he asked. ‘Is he your brother?’.

‘Best friend,’ he replied. ‘Killed in action. Very talented. A brilliant sculpture.’

‘Oh,’ said Will quietly.

‘That’s his pipe actually.’

‘You use his pipe?’.

‘Yes. I know he would have wanted me to have it. It makes him still a little alive for me whenever I smoke it. Do you understand?’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Brennan Manning  ‘Abba’s Child’

Grace and healing are communicated through the vulnerability of men and women who have been fractured and heartbroken by life. In Love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Madeline Martin ‘The Last Bookshop in London’

Grace closed her eyes, fighting off a swell of worry. Staying busy would help get her through this. After all, she’d worked through concern and hurt before, when her mother was ill. Even after she’d died. Grace’s tasks would keep her mind occupied. She blinked her eyes open and put on a bright smile for no one in particular.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grace was reading her latest book, Of Human Bondage, an incredible tale of a man who grew up at the mercy of life’s worst cruelties. It pulled at a wounded part of Grace that had been buried deep, a place she suspected everyone kept inside themselves, that remained tender despite one’s victories and strengths.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mr. Evans looked up when she entered and immediately straightened from where he was bent over his ledger. “What is it?”

“A telegraph.” It was all Grace could muster.

His mouth set in a hard line. “Colin?”

Grace nodded.

Mr. Evans’s eyes closed behind his spectacles and stayed closed for a long time before he blinked them open. “He was too good for the likes of this bloody war.”

Grace’s throat went tight with the familiar ache of mourning.

“Go home, Miss Bennett.” The tip of his nose had gone pink. “I’ll cover your wages for the next week.”

She shook her head vehemently. “I’d like to work. Please.” Even she could hear the desperate tremble in her voice.

He studied her a long time and finally nodded. “But if you want to go, you need only ask.”

She nodded, grateful for a chance for a reprieve from her grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There was a sadness in his eyes that Grace felt in her core, the hollow emptiness of grief. One that had resonated since her mother’s death and never went silent.

She carefully set the glass on a stack of boxes, away from his reach. “Does it bother you that I look like Alice?”

His gaze slid to Grace and paused as though considering her appearance in earnest. Tears filled his eyes, and his chin began to tremble. Quickly, he looked away and a hearty sniff filled the room.

“In the beginning.” There was a quaver to his voice, but he cleared his throat. “Every time I’d see you, I’d see my Alice. She had blond hair, like me. Before this.” His fingers danced over his white, rumpled hair.

Grace said nothing, letting him speak.

“I thought I’d buried her here.” He slapped his open hand on his chest and gave an exhale that seemed to cause him great pain. “Now I know, such things are too great to be contained. It also makes me realize I wasn’t only trying to push aside my grief, but also my guilt.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He looked up and narrowed his eyes, immediately suspicious. Grace patted her hair once more, self-conscious, and his attention drifted to the wristlet.

His jaw set. “I heard Clerkenwell was hit last night.”

Grace couldn’t look at him. Not with the tears welling in her eyes. She would be strong. She was better than this.

His steps thumped softly over the carpet as he came around the counter. “Grace,” he said softly. “Are you all right?”

Brushing him off with a simple yes would have been easier, but the tenderness in his tone and her aching need for comfort was too great. Even as she shook her head, his arms went around her, like a father’s, pulling her into an embrace of comfort such as she hadn’t known since her mother’s.

Tears fell, and the details from that night spilled from her lips while he held her. Her burden eased as she shared what she’d seen, leaning on his strength, not realizing how much she had needed it.

“I was in the Great War,” he said as she wiped at her eyes with a handkerchief. “You never forget, but it becomes part of you. Like a scar no one can see.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Though Mrs. Weatherford remained seemingly in high spirits, Grace could see the cracks in her forced joviality. It came in the moments she thought no one was looking, when the smile wilted from her lips and a pained look pinched at her features in a sudden onset of agony.

Grace knew that hurt.

Loss.

For Colin.

His absence was felt like a missing limb. No-a missing heart.

His smile, his kindness, his light–no Christmas would ever be the same without him. And no amount of frosted holly leaves or painted newspaper garland could make that go away.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There had been so much death.

Too much.

Her mother. Colin. Mr. Evans. Mr. Pritchard. All the bombing victims she’d seen in those harrowing months.

There had been so much loss in so little time. It built up inside her like a tidal wave battering at a weakening dam. The more it swelled, the harder Grace worked.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Eric Metaxas  ‘Martin Luther’

Death is oh so bitter – not so much to the dying as to the living whom the dead leave behind.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In August, 1528, Luther and Kathie lost their daughter, Elisabeth, just eight months old. Luther’s love for this tiny girl made his grief over her loss quite overwhelming: “It is amazing what a grieving, almost womanly heart she has bequeathed me, so much has grief for her overcome me. Never would I have believed that a father’s heart could feel so tenderly for his child.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Amy Meyerson ‘The Bookshop of Yesterdays’

I’d never even thought enough about Billy to realise he was grieving the entire time I knew him.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Evelyn was dead, and Billy was trying to find a way to continue living with her.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sadness is like a maze. You make some mistakes along the way, but eventually you find your way out.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When Sheila stood at Daniel’s graveside, she imagined that her isolation felt similar to the loneliness Daniel always experienced, even with her.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

“We met in the mid-80’s. In grief counselling. We both left rather quickly for our own reasons.” Sheila said that everything about the group had exhausted her. Even it’s name, Grief United, as though losses can be shared. “Fragments of pain aren’t like pieces of a puzzle,” She blew into her mug, creating waves across the jasmine surface. “They can’t fit together to form something grander. Knowing that others, that strangers, suffered, too, it didn’t make me feel less alone.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sheila saw her sadness as something that could be reduced but never vanquished.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sheila had several friends who’d called her for months after Daniel died. She’d ignored the phone, erased their messages. The calls dwindled until they stopped completely. She was too embarrassed now to reach out to them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

James Moloney  ‘The Love That I Have’

It wasn’t shame that had kept him on this pallet for almost a week. It wasn’t guilt that he’d survived while Margot Lipsky had perished. It was Margot Baumann’s death that had broken him in a way the konzentrationslager had never quite managed to do.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He’d been in love with Margot Baumann and there, outside the station, he felt the loss of her more keenly than ever before. No, he couldn’t go home to Hannover until he’d conquered the raw hurt of her death. His eyes fell on his own words again until it came to him – what he must do to face down that pain. The dead should know that they are loved. He would lay this letter on her grave. Only then could he be a whole human being once more.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There was both comfort and pain in remembering the dead; no one knew this better than Dieter.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I cry for them. I can’t help it, can’t stop. I go from prisoner to prisoner and my tears spill onto their filthy uniforms. Many are going to die, no matter what Anita does for them… ‘The SS stopped feeding the sick a week ago. They reasoned that they were going to die anyway so why waste food on them?’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Thomas Moore  ‘Soul Mates’

Death doesn’t erase a relationship; it simply places it in a different context.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Heather Morris  ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’

Lale has witnessed an unimaginable act. He staggers to his feet, standing on the threshold of hell, an inferno of feelings raging inside him.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Images of Gita and his mother come to him, the two women he loves most, floating just out of reach. Grief comes in waves, threatening to drown him.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Around her she can feel the recognition of those witnessing her moment of grief. They look on in silence, each going into their own dark place of despair, not knowing what has become of their own families.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Lale doesn’t know how or with what words the Romani honour their dead, but feels a reflex to respond to these deaths in a way he has always known. ‘Yisgadal veyiskadash shmei rabbah – May his name be magnified and made holy…’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Several of the men join him in silence, a silence that is no longer quiet. A wall of grief surrounds them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Gita doesn’t know how to break the spell of Lale’s grief. They have both withstood, for more than two and a half years, the worst of humanity. But this is the first time she’s seen Lale sink to this depth of depression.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Indira Naidoo ‘The Space Between the Stars’

Is it possible to ever heal a tear in your universe? Can three now become two?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

With just one phone call my world has gone dark.

It’s like being blasted by an atomic wave – the impact hurtling me out of myself in violent slow motion. I’ve been flung through the air like a floundering crash-test dummy with no airbag to save me.

I’ve landed with a thud, buried alive in a bleak nuclear winter, the radioactive fallout settling around me like deadly fluttering snowflakes. The calcium is leaching from my bones. There’s a black chasm where my rib cage used to be. I can put my hand right through myself.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

A suffocating silence would have been tolerable but not this. There’s a guttural howling in my head. Tortured cries. Anguished wails. Smothered whimpers. I don’t recognise the voice, but I know it belongs to me. I didn’t know loss could trigger a sonic assault like this, from within. An incessant, moaning, discordant sonata only I can hear.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The next morning, I pull open the curtains to face the first day without her.

I’m blinded by dazzling sunshine. It’s incandescent. Almost indecent. This is the cruel trick grief plays on you. For the rest of the world the day is humming with happiness.

But there’s a thick smear of Vaseline over my lens… The world is blurry and fogged over, and no adjusting the dials can bring it back into focus.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I’m overwhelmed by the urge to flee – to throw open my apartment door and just run and run, not to anywhere in particular, just away from myself. To feel the breeze stinging my eyes with hot tears and filling my lungs with life again. If only the inertia weren’t so crippling. My legs won’t move. Just put one foot in front of the other. You’ve done it a million times. But it’s hopeless. I’m a crumpled marionette waiting for a puppeteer to reanimate me. Alone in the universe.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

For the briefest of seconds, a fug of confusion plays tricks on me, and I forget last night’s phone call ever happened. My mind merrily begins check listing the day I was planning to have… and then the unbearable darkness of being rushes back, punching me in the gut.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I turn the corner into the café strip along Challis Avenue… I spy some neighbours in the line but thankfully they’re too preoccupied with their phones to notice the haunted figure scurrying past them. I will break if anyone asks me how I am.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The she-oaks and the eucalypts lean in closer still. My skin tingles from an unseen embrace. With no words passing between us, these trees seem to intuitively know what I need: openness and enclosure. There’s a clearing just ahead, where I sit down on the grass, the smell of damp earth rising through the roots… In this stillness there’s space to hear my turbulent thoughts. My head is all at sea, shipwrecked on a wild, nightmarish coastline, listing dangerously, inches above the waterline.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

As I surrender to the quiet, the torrents of emotion coalesce into the unformed words that have been haunting me: You were her older sister. It was your job to keep her safe. How could you have failed her so utterly?

The accusation hangs dark and heavy in the morning air…  

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Something on the ground catches my eye. A spider’s web, intricately woven between two blades of grass, quivers in the sunlight. A tiny chandelier of dewdrops hangs from its silken threads. Any other time I would have carelessly trampled over this labour of love. Thankfully, today my fractured heart can sit with its fragile beauty.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Here with this tree, secluded in this wedge of nature, I sense I can sit alone yet not feel isolated. I can draw on this tree for a unique form of solace. It will be here but ask nothing of me. I can come to rest and recover without needing to give anything in return. Instead of doing. I can just be.

Can this tree and the fragments of urban nature around me lead me out of my grief?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

As my eyes adjust to the dark expanse, more stars become visible… I try to imagine the intensity of those burning suns on the edge of known matter… Many would have ceased to exist long before their light even reached me.

Then again, peering up at these sparkling wonders l can also see the good that can come from endings. Just like Stargirl, their radiance can burn brightly long after they are gone. The glow from their embers can light the way for others and guide travellers on their treacherous crossings. As long as you can see the stars, you can never truly be lost.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I realise I could endlessly scour this infinite expanse, looking into dark places that even light struggles to illuminate, searching for the reason why Stargirl is gone. Even the gods can’t be expected to decipher the unfathomable. I am trying to solve a murder mystery no detective could ever crack. And that’s because it’s not a whodunnit but a whydunnit. The victim was the assailant.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is such a solitary affliction. No two people feel it the same way. Even when it involves the same event or the same person, you’re trapped in a torment tailor-made for you.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Take it from me. Those gripped by grief make unreliable witnesses. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that something happened. What that something is, gets further distorted by the trickery of time.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you’re nursing a splintered heart, you’re more vulnerable to the pain of others

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Other parts of my urban backyard seem to have relished the rain. Beyond the naval fleet, across Woolloomooloo Bay – Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden is bursting with vigour. The grassy slopes are a vibrant green and the trees seem to have expanded from the deluge.

Why does seeing that wedge of green wildness make my battered heart soar so?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Just seeing my tree again makes me feel immediately nourished. I can gaze at it whenever I need. It can be my lighthouse on the headland. I feel my shoulders drop. My pulse rate slows. I notice my breathing relax.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Through it all (the gold rush, the First World War, the Spanish flu) my tree would have sheltered others like me, the wounded and broken. It would have been – as it is now – a place of solace and safety. It couldn’t fix, it couldn’t change. All it could do was be present. The greatest comfort anyone can offer.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The ripples from a death touch so many. Close family and friends and then the friends and family of those family and friends. It can create a village of grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Numbness serves an important role when you’re first electrocuted by the shock of grief. It’s the trip-switch that prevents your entire grid from overloading and short circuiting.

Something as mundane as popping down to the supermarket for some milk is like entering an underground interrogation chamber: refrigerated air as cold as a morgue, blinding overhead lights, torturous cheery voices assailing me from loudspeakers, the clanging of metal trolleys, masked faces with furtive eyes.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sue Stuart-Smith’s clinical work with death and depression keeps her largely indoors, which was why, she writes, she was drawn to gardening and the outdoors for some solace. Being in nature reminds her of the continuity of life and how our day-to-day lives are part of the cycle of death.

But she warns: If we think about dying too much it interferes with living, but if we never think about death, we remain perilously unprepared.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Maybe that’s what a feather can teach me. That my fragility is my strength. Perhaps I shouldn’t see the fractures and losses as weaknesses: The chinks in my breastplate are just the scars of battle.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Before Stargirl’s death froze me in my tracks, I’d been too busy doing to be fully aware of the tiny moments of wonder unfurling around me. Tree-time is changing that. As soon as I step into my tree’s shadow, a cloak of stillness slips over me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There is still a melancholy about Steve as he shares these painful stories with me, and as we pack away our birdwatching outpost, I wonder how long grief keeps you imprisoned in its suffocating grip.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Will Stargirl’s death cast a forever shadow over me, blocking just enough light so each new experience feels a little grey and hollow? Or can nature be an alchemist, transforming my sorrow into the beauty I see around me?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Weeds are adaptable and resilient, able to survive and thrive in unforgiving landscapes. They are an example of how nature will always find a way of asserting itself.

I want to be a survivor like them. As I struggle to reassemble my broken insides, I’m willing them to give up their secrets.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My mind has been tossing and turning, unable to settle. No matter what I do, I can’t shut it down. It seems to be fuelled by its own power pack of dark matter, constantly twisting and coiling, chasing and fleeing.

The isolation of loss is the worst kind of haunting. How do you escape from yourself?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Why is there no word for a parent who loses a child?

Is it because it goes against what nature intended? Or is it that the loss is so profound, the heartbreak so seismic, we believe that if there is no word for a terrible thing, perhaps we can ensure it will not happen to us?

I came across a Sanskrit word, not in mainstream English usage, that goes some way to describing the incapacitating anguish a parent must feel. The word is vilomah and it means against the natural order – the grey-haired should never bury those with dark hair.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I’ve come across a fascinating term involving puddles, following one of my monthly grief-counselling sessions with Wendy. The state of leaping in and out of grief is known as puddle-jumping. It’s been given this name because children are more likely to be affected by this form of bereavement. One moment they’re flat and uncommunicative, the next they’re skipping and laughing with their friends.

I’ve experienced similar grief swings since Stargirl died. Present in a conversation one moment, then disappearing the next.

Just like a puddle.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Welcome to Nightlife… thanks for joining me…

I overestimate the resilience of some of my listeners as the unknowingness of the COVID lockdown stretches into an abyss. The darkness brings out their demons and then my own. Why is this happening? When will it end? Who can we blame? AIl the same questions I asked when Stargirl died.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Buried deep within these caves of grief, I’ve chipped away at the sediment bit by bit, to uncover what lies beneath.

What I have found has, at times, paralysed me with its horror. I understand now why we keep things buried in our bag of shadows, afraid to look inside. But what we fear is worse than what we find.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Jayne Newling  ‘Missing Christopher’

Loss, the dead weight of it, had enfolded our lives, our grief making us strangers to each other and the outside world. Silence filled the empty rooms as we all crouched in darkened corners looking for something to do, something to say.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The coffin disappeared behind the black velvet curtain. Gone. Over. Nothing. The space, the years, the love, the laughter had been replaced with an emptiness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Silence enveloped us in the days and weeks after the funeral. It wasn’t just a blanket of grief but the white shock of disbelief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When a parent loses a child through an illness, accident or even murder, the grief lasts a lifetime. Their only comfort perhaps is that their child wanted to live. For Phil and me and thousands of other parents of children who suicide, not only do we have to grieve their death and deal with the sudden vacuum it has left in our lives, but there’s the guilt and shame that they wanted to die. Parents want and need to protect their children.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The long, sad journey of the years has wearied us all, made us watchful, vigilant, fearful of what could happen next.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Time has, in some ways, eased the torment, but the melancholia of loss never leaves you. It bubbles deep down within but is flat and inert just under the first layer of skin.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief hung in the cage of my mind, a disinterested pendulum marking time with a metronomic thud. When you watch your child die, take their last breath, that moment will be marked forever. It will define who you were, what you are, what you will become.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We were marooned by our loss but cocooned by our love and trust for each other. During those early years, we could see each other’s grief but couldn’t touch it. We were scared of it for ourselves and for each other. We couldn’t help or save each other.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

John O’Donohue  ‘Benedictus: A Book Of Blessings’

For Grief

When you lose someone you love,

Your life becomes strange,

The ground beneath you becomes fragile,

Your thoughts make your eyes unsure:

And some dead echo drags your voice down

Where words have no confidence.

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;

And though this loss has wounded others too,

No one knows what has been taken from you

When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret

For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;

Again inside the fullness of life,

Until the moment breaks

And you are thrown back

Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,

You are able to function well

Until in the middle of work or encounter,

Suddenly with o warning,

You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until the coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance

With the invisible form of your departed,

And when the work of grief is done,

The wound of loss will heal

And you will have learned

To wean your eyes

From that gap of air

And be able to enter the hearth

In your soul where your loved one

Has awaited your return

All the time

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

George Orwell ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed – cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece – always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist’s lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Patton Oswalt, comedian

Grief is an attack on life. It’s not a seducer. It’s an ambush or worse.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Max Porter  ‘Grief is the Thing with Feathers’

Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, Wells, covered in a film of grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

There’s grief and there’s impractical obsession.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We used to think she would turn up one day and say it had all been a test.            We used to think we would both die at the same age she had.                                   We used to think she could see us through mirrors.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Moving on as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Emily Post  ‘Etiquette’

At no time does solemnity so possess our souls as when we stand deserted at the brink of darkness into which our loved one has gone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Chaim Potok ‘The Gift of Asher Lev’

The mind is numb, the heart is heavy, the tongue cleaves to the palate. Sorrow weighs upon us all.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

They stood there with somber eyes, mournful faces, sagging shoulders: the body language of sorrow.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sadness is forbidden on the Seventh Day.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Some burdens are best born in silence.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The sadness grew within her until she seemed to exist only as a dark nimbus of melancholy – her father had perished in Auschwitz, as did her other relatives; her mother, in Budy, a small camp for women near Auschwitz.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Memories of the Holocaust often come unbidden to mind. They dwell in a realm of their own and are not subject to the laws and whims of humankind.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Chaim Potok ‘In The Beginning’

‘No one comes into my house,’ she said. ‘Do you know what it’s like when no one comes into your house. It’s like living with the Angel of Death.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My mother sighed and shook her head. There are things your father does not like to talk about often.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She said nothing. She was not there. She was crying in front of my eyes on a street in the Bronx, but she was somewhere else, crying for another time, over a death carved cruelly into her memory. I could not comprehend her grief and I did not know what to do.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

She did the housework and wrote letters; that was her life. And she lived in caverns of fear too easily explored by her when events in America called to her mind Lemberg and Bobrek and whatever darkness she had left behind in Europe.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

A sudden darkness came across her features as if shadows had leaped upon her from the dim corners of the kitchen. Faint tremors moved across the weak line of her lips. I heard her say, almost in a moan, “What will the end be, David? We cannot do everything. We are only flesh and bones.”

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Annie Proulx  ‘Barkskins’

In every life, there are events that reshape one’s sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

E. R. Ramzipoor ‘The Ventriloquists’

There is a wretched brand of crying that I hope you’ll never endure, when you weep so hard and so long that your body turns on you. Fed up with your own nonsense, you fall into a sort of sleep. That is what became of me. I wept until there was nothing left in my body, using up every bit of feeling I owned until I was a raw, withered husk.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Marilynne Robinson  ‘Gilead’

I’m grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

As you read this, I hope you will understand that when I speak of the long night that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort – grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God’s good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Marilynne Robinson ‘Home’

When their father spoke to the Lord he spoke in earnest – out of the depths, as he said sometimes. Out of a grief so generous it embraced them all.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings. But the thought that she could speak to them in their weary sleep with the memory of comfort lifted her spirits a little.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Richard Rohr  ‘Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer’

Historic cultures saw grief as a time of incubation, hibernation, initiation, and transformation. Yet we avoid this sacred space. When we avoid such darkness, we miss out on spiritual creativity and new awareness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Fred Rogers

You’ll never stop missing the people you love.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Judi Rose  ‘Journeys of the Heart’

Everyone truly grieves in their own way.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Rituals of all kinds, no matter how simple, are helpful in managing pain and grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Tears help us through the pain and suffering of life.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

James Runcie ‘The Road to Grantchester’

To survive with Robert dead, is abhorrent, even obscene. He wishes he could have died instead.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘You can’t help what they might think – and neither can they. There’s so much grief and rage. Most of it unspoken. Which makes it worse.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘I’m sorry. It’s been over a year and the grief just gets worse and worse. Will it ever get any better? How much do you think about him?’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The grandfather clock is no longer ticking. Lady Kendall sees Sidney notice. ‘We didn’t stop it deliberately. We just don’t have the heart to wind it up.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He hasn’t thought of his friend for several days…In fact, he hasn’t thought about anything deliberately at all. Instead, he decides on this surrender to simplicity, only dealing with what he can manage.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Robert’s room still looks as if he has just left it. Lady Kendall says that she changes the sheets once a month. ‘I find it comforting. Sometimes I even have a lie down.’
Lady Kendall continues, ‘I want the room to be serene. I like to feel that Robert can come back and that we will be always prepare dfor him. I hope you don’t think that’s foolish.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘It doesn’t seem fair. I always thought we were a lucky family…’
‘I cannot help but feel that everything has been my fault. I didn’t love my son enough to protect him.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘I don’t know if it will ever get better. Time’s not the healer everyone says it is.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

George Saunders ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

He emitted a single, heartrending sob. Or gasp. I heard it as more a gasp. A gasp of recognition. Of recollection. Of suddenly remembering what had been lost. And touched the face and hair fondly.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

One feels such love for the little ones, such anticipation that all that is lovely in life will be known by them, such fondness for that set of attributes manifested uniquely in each: mannerisms of bravado, of vulnerability, habits of speech and mispronouncement and so forth; the smell of the hair and head, the feel of the tiny hand in yours—and then the little one is gone! Taken! One is thunderstruck that such a brutal violation has occurred in what had previously seemed a benevolent world. From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We have loved each other well, dear Willie, but now, for reasons we cannot understand, that bond has been broken. But our bond can never be broken. As long as I live, you will always be with me, child.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory. (the reverend everly thomas)

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

All over now. He is either in joy or nothingness.
(So why grieve?
The worst of it, for him, is over.)
Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing

Only there is nothing left to do.

Free myself of this darkness as I can, remain useful, not go mad.

Think of him, when I do, as being in some bright place, free of suffering, resplendent in a new mode of being.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mary Lincoln’s mental health had never been good, and the loss of young Willie ended her life as a functional wife and mother.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Oh, the pathos of it! – haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He was attempting to formulate a goodbye, in some sort of positive spirit, and wishing not to enact that final departure in gloom, in case it might be felt, somehow, by the lad (even as he told himself that the lad was now past all feeling); but all within him was sadness, guilt, and regret, and he could find little else. So he lingered, hoping for some comforting notion to arise, upon which he might expand.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defense) may there possibly be?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Blame and Guilt are the furies that haunt houses where death takes children like Willie Lincoln; and in this case there was more than enough blame to go around.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

 I had thought this helpful. It is not. I need not look upon it again. When I need to look upon Willie, I will do so in my heart. As is proper. There where he is yet intact and whole. If I could confer with him, I know he would approve; would tell me it is right that I should go and come back no more. He was such a noble spirit. His heart loved goodness most.

So good. Dear little chap. Always knew the right thing to do. And would urge me to do it. I will do it now. Though it is hard. All gifts are temporary. I unwillingly surrender this one. And thank you for it. God. Or world. Whoever it was gave it to me, I humbly thank you, and pray that I did right by him, and may, as I go ahead, continue to do right by him.

Love, love, I know what you are.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Shirley Shackleton  ‘The Circle of Silence’

Grief takes a persona whose needs are paramount. Grief requires quiet and solitude. Grief demands rest, lots of rest. At the most grief requires a cup of tea given without talk, without advice, without weeping. Grief does not need platitudes.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Burrows  ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’

The war goes on and on. When my son Ian died at El Alamein visitors meaning to comfort me said, ‘Life goes on.’ What nonsense I thought, of course it doesn’t. It’s death that goes on. Ian is dead now and will be denied tomorrow and the next year and forever. There’s no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it. Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of – Hope? Happiness?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I have been reading an article by a woman called Gisèlle Pelletier, a political prisoner held at Ravensbrück for five years. She writes about how difficult it is for you to get on with your life as a camp survivor. No one in France – neither friends nor family – wants to know anything about your life in the camps, and they think that the sooner you put it out of your mind – and out of their hearing – the happier you’ll be.

According to Miss Pelletier, it is not that you want to belabour anyone with details, but it did happen to you and you can’t pretend it didn’t. The only thing that helps is to talk to your fellow survivors. They know what life in the camps was. You speak, and they can speak back. They talk, they rail, they cry, they tell one story after another – some tragic, some absurd. Sometimes they can even laugh together. The relief is enormous.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Josh Squires

Grief is an act as well as a feeling.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Weeping is a vulnerable act that floods our thoughts and feelings, leaving us fatigued.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is exhausting. Physically and emotionally we find ourselves worn out.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Those in grief need rest.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Jill Stark  ‘Happy Never After’

the ‘grief of exclusion’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

In our buttoned-up western world, grieving is to be done discretely and behind closed doors. Our fixation with happiness has taught us to airbrush death out of life’s narrative.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘car grieving’ – silent mourning – where the soundproofed isolation of our car is the only safe place to express our most profound emotions.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is not meant to be quiet. Denying it an outlet isn’t healthy. And it’s an insult to those we’ve lost. When you make space for it, grief can be the grandest monument to love. And yet, there are arbitrary time limits placed on the bereaved.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Some people would say anything to avoid talking about Jude, terrified it would trigger more hurt. It had the opposite effect. Fiona told me, ‘I’m not over the death of my baby boy and I never will be, so the mention of his name doesn’t remind me that he died, it let’s me know that people remember that he lived.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It’s possible to choose to be okay while at the same time living with a broken heart.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

M L Stedman ‘The Light Between Oceans’

On the Lights, Tom Sherbourne has plenty of time to think about the war. About the faces, the voices of the blokes who had stood beside him, who saved his life one way or another; the ones whose dying words he heard, and those whose muttered jumbles he couldn’t make out, but who he nodded to anyway.

Tom isn’t one of the men whose legs trailed by a hank of sinews, or whose guts cascaded from their casing like slithering eels. Nor were his lungs turned to glue or his brains to stodge by the gas. But he’s scarred all the same, having to live in the same skin as the man who did the things that needed to be done back then.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

But exploring the memories now, the jagged pain was like running his tongue over a broken tooth. He could see his eight-year-old self, tugging his father’s sleeve and crying, ‘Please! Please let her come back. Please, Daddy. I love her!’ and his father wiping his hand away like a grubby mark. ‘You don’t mention her again in this house. You hear, son?’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Just to be beside her had made him feel cleaner somehow, refreshed. Yet the sensation leads him back into the darkness, back into the galleries of wounded flesh and twisted limbs. To make sense of it – that’s the challenge. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it. There’s no reason he should still be alive, un-maimed. Suddenly Tom realises he is crying. He weeps for the men snatched away to his left and right, when death had no appetite for him. He weeps for the men he killed.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

As Tom lit up for the evening, he still couldn’t drive away the uneasiness, nor could he tell whether it came from the past – re-awakened grief- or from foreboding. As he made his way down the narrow, winding stairs, across each of the metal landings, he felt a heaviness in his chest, and a sense of sliding back into a darkness he thought he had escaped.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a patent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

It was as if one of the shells from the French frontline had exploded in the middle of her family, leaving a crater that she could never fill or repair. Violet would spend days tidying her sons’ rooms, polishing the silver frames of their photographs. Bill became silent.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He cannot reconcile the grief he feels at what he has done and the profound relief that runs through him. Two opposing physical forces, they create an inexplicable reaction overpowered by a third, stronger force – the knowledge of having deprived his wife of a child.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Isabel sits alone under the jacaranda. Her grief for Lucy is as strong as ever: a pain that has no location and no cure. Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Rick Stein  ‘Under a Mackerel Sky’

I don’t remember much about the funeral, just his coffin in St. Merryn church and then a slow car journey to the crematorium in Truro. I don’t even remember if there was a wake. My mother received masses and masses of letters about what a great person he was. She was just broken. So sad, but angry too. She spoke of being furious and let down. I thought it was a little hard to be angry with someone who had just killed himself. Only later did I realise what an enormous strain it is living with someone with mental illness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Cheryl Strayed   ‘Wild: A Journey From Lost To Found’

My two siblings scattered in their grief, in spite of my efforts to hold us together, until I gave up and scattered as well.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We went to the women’s restroom. Each of us locked in separate stalls, weeping. We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Since she died, everything had changed. It was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My mum was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My grief obliterated my ability to hold back. So much had been denied me, I reasoned. Why should I deny myself.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

As I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart. That was me.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I thought about the fox. I remembered the moment after he’d disappeared into the woods and I’d called out for my mother. It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     •••••• 

Conversation with a woman who gave her a lift: ‘After my son died, I died too, inside. I look the same, but I’m not the same in here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of me. I try not to act like it, but it did.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The loss of my family and home were my own private clear-cut. What remained was only ugly evidence of a thing that was no more.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief doesn’t have a face.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III  ‘Sully’

And so Lorrie and I, my sister and her husband,  along with my mom and a young minister, gathered after his death to scatter his ashes across our property in front of Lake Texoma.

It was a cold, bleak, grey day. In Texas, in the winter, the grass is dormant and brown. It all felt so lonely.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

Donna Tartt ‘The Goldfinch’

How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I keep remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event – everything I did for the rest of my life – would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

“Sorry.” People I knew said it, and people who had never spoken to me in my life. Other people – laughing and talking in the hallways – fell silent when I walked by, throwing grave and quizzical looks my way. Others still ignored me completely, as playful dogs will ignore an ill or injured dog in their midst: refusing to look at me, by romping and frolicking around me in the hallways as if I weren’t there.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

Maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••  

Miriam Toews  ‘All My Puny Sorrows’

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Amor Towles ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

No matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Anthony Trollope  ‘Barchester Towers’

And thus the widow’s deep grief was softened, and a sweet balm was poured into the wound which she thought nothing but death could heal. How much kinder is God to us than we are willing to be to ourselves! At the loss of every dear face, at the last going of every well-beloved one, we all doom ourselves to an eternity of sorrow and look to waste ourselves away in an ever-running fountain of tears. How seldom does such grief endure! How blessed is the goodness which forbids it to do so! “Let me remember my living friends, but forget them as soon as dead”, was the prayer of a wise man who understood the mercy of God. Few perhaps would have the courage to express such a wish, and yet to do so would only be to ask for that release from sorrow which a kind Creator almost always extends to us.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Gareth Tuckwell & David Flagg  ‘A Question of Healing’

Grieving is hard work, and this needs recognising by others. All kinds of physical, mental and spiritual symptoms can occur – and we may be unable to cope with the smallest of everyday demands.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Donna VanLiere  ‘The Angels of Morgan Hill’

There’s nothing as deafening as grief. No matter what you do it just rings loud in your ears.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ann Voskamp  ‘One Thousand Gifts’

From my own beginning, my sister’s death tears a hole in the canvas of the world. Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ann Voskamp  ‘The Broken Way’

I just know that – old scars can break open like fresh wounds and your unspoken broken can start to rip you wide open and maybe the essence of all the questions is: how in the holy name of God do you live with your one broken heart?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Great grief isn’t made to fit inside your body. It’s why your heart breaks.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Maybe our hearts are made to be broken. Maybe the deepest wounds birth deepest wisdom.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Time never heals wounds like God does.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

No one is really dead when obituaries are read or headstones are bought or flowers are brought to the grave; death only happens when one is forgotten.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sadness is a gift to avoid the nothingness of numbness, and all the hard places need water. Grief is a gift, and after a rain of tears, there is always more of you than before. Rain always brings growth.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is the guaranteed price we always pay for love.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Loss can always be transformative.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The wounds that never heal are always the ones mourned alone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Ann Voskamp

The worst grief is the hidden grief that cannot speak.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief is like caged fear.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It’s the broken hearts that find the haunting loveliness of a new beat — it’s the broken hearts that make a song that echoes God’s.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

We never cry alone.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When grief is deepest, words need be fewest.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Scars speak a private language that only the wounded know.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Jesmyn Ward  ‘Men We Reaped’

My brother was newly dead. I expected him to be alive every day when I woke.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

After Rog’s funeral, I tapped Rhea’s shoulder. I opened my arms, hugged her… I wondered what I would have wanted someone, anyone, to say to me when my brother died, anything beyond ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘Are you okay?’ I knew the answer to those questions. I whispered in her ear: ‘He will always be your brother, and you will always be his sister.’
What I meant to say was this: ‘You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

But I do not tell Charing these stories, I would not add to her burden of loss, especially when she already carries blame… The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

One day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

My misery and grief and loneliness were so close. It slept with me. It walked with me down the crowded streets.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I carry the weight of grief even as I struggle to live. I understand what it feels like to be under siege.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Jesmyn Ward  ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’

A year after Given died, Mama planted a tree for him. One every anniversary, she said, pain cracking her voice. If I live long enough, going to be a forest here, she said, a whispering forest. Talking about the wind and pollen and beetle rot.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out of my grief when I was with him.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I feel better except for the dream. It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Kay Warren  ‘Choose Joy’

All I could see in that moment was the track of sorrow in my life; joy was nowhere near. The immediate challenge was to believe that treasures in the darkness actually exist and then to believe I could find them. And yes, I had to accept and embrace the truth that these treasures are a special category of gifts from God, hidden riches only to be found in the secret places of my deepest pain and agony.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Michael Whatling ‘The French Baker’s War’

A type of madness takes hold of him – a combination of grief, and anger, and self-pity.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The emotions of the day drag on her like chains.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The pain comes in waves, throbbing like a racing heartbeat, often scorching like his feet are being dipped in acid.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

‘Sorrow is a heavy fruit,’ Monsieur Durand says in sympathy. ‘But we have to trust the Almighty doesn’t let it grow on branches too weak to bear it.’

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He can’t help but think an absence isn’t a hole. It’s a presence living inside you, eating its way out.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Everyone suffers alone, but when a kindred spirit is encountered, they should join hands and suffer alone together.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

For one of the few times in his life, he finds himself floundering. All they can do is share the silence.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

That’s the thing about pain – unlike a memory, it eventually fades despite the scars it leaves behind.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Only the most devoted intimacy with suffering can teach you that the pain of one person is indistinguishable from another.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Most of those who were arrested in the raid were released, but remain tight-lipped about what happened to them only sharing it in hushed tones. Those who were killed or never let go are not spoken of as if they never existed.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Every emotion within him fights for control, hacking wretchedness and loss the most dominant among them.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

He mourns with the emotions of a lone survivor of a sunken ship – sorrow for a loved one is made worse by the question: Why wasn’t it me?

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Being called that reprehensible insult leaves him devastated, no different from if he’d been pummeled by fists. He’s had a lifetime of names. Cuts and bruises heal, vindictive words fester.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Monsieur Durand slogs home, feeling more lonely and abandoned than ever, a comfortless shadow fading into the night.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Andre is in pain, and when someone can’t endure their pain any longer, they wield it like a scythe, cutting down everything.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Sadness gurgles up inside him, not over his father’s death, exactly, but for what might have been.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Saddled with uncertainty about her family’s fate for so long, she was already walking around wearing half of her grief like sackcloth. Now that the worst has been confirmed she’s ready to don its full coat, oversized and oppressive.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Litsa Williams

We are limited is our ability to truly understand another’s grief because most of us have yet to fully understand our own.

• •• •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Niall Williams  ‘John’

Instead the wolf of grief he took inside himself and let it roam and savage freely.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Raynor Winn ‘The Salt Path’

It came like a contraction. All-consuming and uncontrollable. I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed. Crying until my body stopped, spent, drained of tears, dried out by loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

I gasped into the running water as I shed a layer of skin and sweat, bitterness, sadness, loss, fear. But only a layer.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

The more times we repeated the lie, the less we felt the grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Each lungful of salt scouring our memories, smoothing their edges, wearing them down.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Too far away now, our home had drifted out of range. It existed, but the distance made it untouchable. The raw, jagged, visceral pain of loss had gone, but the memory of it was still there.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Raynor Winn ‘The Wild Silence’

Those few books we collected before we closed the door and left our old lives behind, never to return, held the sound of bailiffs as they hammered at the door, the fear of not knowing if we would ever find shelter again, and an overwhelming sadness.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

His fading memory was opening a bottomless box of loss into which all the memories of our long life together would slowly be drawn.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Our path had led us through the pain and despair of loss…

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Trauma can change you… It leaves a scar.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Nicholas Wolterstorff, philosopher

We need an affirmation of God’s Presence in our grief.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

H. Norman Wright  ‘Experiencing the Loss of a Family Member’

When a person moves into the world of grief, he or she enters a world of unpredictability, chaos and pain.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Each person in grief will have his or her own unique experience of it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

When you enter into grief, you’ve entered into the valley of shadows. There is nothing heroic or noble about grief. It’s painful. It’s work. It’s a lingering process. But it is necessary for all kinds of losses.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grieving is a disorderly process. It can’t be controlled and it can’t be scheduled.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Whenever there is loss, there will be grief. But some people do not grieve or mourn; they make a choice to repress all the feelings inside of them, so their grief accumulates. Saving it up won’t lessen grief’s pain; it will only intensify it.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grief takes on many faces – disruption, a feeling of emptiness, confusion. It disrupts one’s entire life schedule. Grief doesn’t leave one particle of life untouched; it is all consuming.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Your grief schedule will be unique. It will take as long as it needs to take, and that, too, is normal.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Grieving is the natural way of working through the loss of a loved one. It is not weakness or absence of faith. It is as natural as crying when you hurt, sleeping when you are tired or sneezing when your nose itches. It is nature’s way of healing a broken heart.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

You never need to apologise for your tears.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

H. Norman Wright  ‘Finding Hope When Life Goes Wrong’

A sudden, unexpected death may disrupt your ability to activate the emotional resources you need to cope with the loss. The more sudden, unexpected, and tragic the event, the greater the impact.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Initially, in times of loss, we tend to dwell on the negative things.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

It is understood that the stronger the attachment, the more intense the feelings of loss.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Philip Yancey  ‘The Question That Never Goes Away’

Words can bring comfort or compound the pain. As followers of Jesus, we can offer a loving and sympathetic presence that may help bind wounds and heal a broken heart.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••

Everyone experiences grief at some point – in the worst case, the terrible grief of losing a child. I see it in my role as first responder, especially after suicides. You live with grief as if in a bubble, and only gradually re-enter the world.

• ••  •••   ••••    •••••     ••••••