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All things grow with time -- except grief.
-Yiddish Proverb
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Time heals old pain, while it creates new ones.
-Proverb
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Grief is light that is capable of counsel.
-Proverb
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Mourning is not forgetting... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for theyshall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.
-Margery Allingham
The Tiger in the Smoke, 1956
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When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
-John Berger
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Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comet in the morning. Psalms 30:5
-Bible
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There's no use in weeping,
Though we are condemned to part:
There's such a thing as keeping
A remembrance in one's heart...
-Charlotte Bronte
Parting
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I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Dear Friend,
Please be patient with me; I need to grieve in my own way and in my own time.
Please don't take away my grief or try to fix my pain. The best thing you can do is listen to me and let me cry on your shoulder. Don't be afraid to cry with me. Your tears will tell me how much you care.
Please forgive me if I seem insensitive to your problems. I feel depleted and drained, like an empty vessel, with nothing left to give.
Please let me express my feelings and talk about my memories. Feel free to share your own stories of my loved one with me. I need to hear them.
Please understand why I must turn a deaf ear to criticism or tired clich
http://www.grievinggodsway.com/
-Margaret Brownley
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Grief is hard on friendships, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, all it takes is a little honesty between friends. If we gently and lovingly explain what we need from the relationship during our time of grief, and what we are willing to do in return, we can turn even a lukewarm friendship into something special.
-Margaret Brownley
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Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.
-Julie Burchill
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
-William S. Burroughs
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Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
-Antonia S. Byatt
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When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,
And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie
In that vast house, common to serfs and Thanes,
I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty-- that remains.
-Madison Cawein
from To a Wind-Flower
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No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
-E. M. Cioran
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
-Cyril Connolly
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One often calms one's grief by recounting it.
-Pierre Corneille
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Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.
-Coleman Dowell
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She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
-George Eliot
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The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Time takes away the grief of men.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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If I be the first of us to die,
Let grief not blacken long your sky.
Be bold yet modest in your grieving.
There is a change but not a leaving.
For just as death is part of life,
The dead live on forever in the living.
And all the gathered riches of our journey,
The moments shared, the mysteries explored,
The steady layering of intimacy stored,
The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,
The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,
The wordless language of look and touch,
The knowing,
Each giving and each taking,
These are not flowers that fade,
Nor trees that fall and crumble,
Nor are they stone,
For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand
And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are.
What we had, we have.
A conjoined past imperishably present.
So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogether
And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,
And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,
And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Listen for my footfall in your heart.
I am not gone but merely walk within you.
-Nicholas Evans
from The Smoke Jumper copyright Nicholas Evans, 2001
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Books about Grief, Grieving
