Loss Processing 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.

My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.

Grief is no more necessary when we understand death than fear is necessary when we understand flying.

Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.

I've been working with a holistic specialist, trying to bring my body into balance, and part of making that happen is putting my mom's death into a healthier perspective. I really need to let her go, let her go into the infinite. I can't keep hanging onto this rope that connects us.

There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.

There is no shortcut to grieving.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

In the days that follow, it's movement, not stillness, that helps to keep the grief at bay.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you.

Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.

let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up.

As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we’re really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.

I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.