Mourning Rituals 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.

Death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

Grief is fantastical, and loves the dead, And the apparel of the grave.

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

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

We don't help people mourn in our society.

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

Funerals...are for the living.

When someone close to you dies, move seats.

It's hard to make progress with grief.

There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living.

Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?

Hired mourners at a funeral say and do - A little more than they whose grief is true

How families deal with loss, everyone has their own process.

This is a lifetime of good-byes. In our time, we will say good-bye to cherished people, things, and ideas. Eventually, we say good-bye to life itself with our death. Learn to say a good good-bye. Allow yourself to mourn each loss. As with a physical wound, the body has its own schedule for healing. It will tell you when it has healed.

To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush's Crawford ranch, ... It's the strangest method of grieving I've seen since Paul Wellstone's funeral. Someone needs to teach these liberals how to mourn.

In Asia, red is the colour of joy; red is the colour of festivities and of celebration. In Chinese culture, blue is the colour of mourning.

Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.