Grief Process Quotes

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Saying good-bye on 'Nurse Jackie' was a really big deal, so I'm sure I was keeping myself guarded from ever having to feel anything like that again on another job, especially a death scene.

I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

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? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.

In 2002, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of colon cancer. And it was such a shock, a surprise to us.

I do a lot of lectures on survival. I always say you can't change what happened, so have a little wallow, feel very sorry for yourself, and then get up and move forward. You can't change what happened.

Mourning can go on for years and years. It doesn't end after a year, that's a false fantasy. It usually ends when people realize that they can live again, that they can concentrate their energies on their lives as a whole, and not on their hurt, and guilt and pain.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

Nut shrugged. "Set had always been Set, for better or worse. But he is still part of our family. It is difficult to lose any member of your family . . . is it not?

Wheather it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

When things have gone really wrong in my life, I've cried like a child. I have really, really cried. I cry it out. Two-three days I cry, and then I'm like, enough, time to deal with reality and figure a way out. This is the way I have dealt with everything.

I never know what to tell them. I mean, there's nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I'd say that for 3 months, you're going to feel worse than you've ever felt and you cope as best you can. And that after 6 months, the pain isn't so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.

If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.

Divorce is hard and painful and complicated, and something you have to grow through.

I think grieving is the same for everybody that lost someone you love deeply. It's the same. You know, you're really no different than anybody else who's lost somebody they adored.

The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, I woke up determined to make a success of Brexit. I was surprised by how quickly I went to acceptance of the result, without passing through any of the prior stages of grief.

I think you grieve different elements, you grieve your wife who's gone, you grieve the fact she had cancer and you had to watch her die, you grieve the fact the life you built isn't going to be the same as the one going forward. All these different elements hit you at different times.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

I never go to funerals. To me a person is dead when he breathes for the last time. After that, your memories should be personal.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.