bereavement

The bereaved need more than just the space to grieve the loss. They also need the space to grieve the transition.

Why do they lie?_ she asked herself aloud. __hey say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse.

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss__erhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they__ cherished together.She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They__ shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl.

Grief is an emotional rollercoaster.You will have your ups and downsand moments of terrorand brief moments of peace.You can only go as fastas the ride will take you.Just remember:It will end and you will be okay.

Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite part of the aging process and the human experience.

Death and parting are the same.

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.

All the sorrows of life are bearable if only we can convert them into a story.

I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride.

Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don__ we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this.

It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them. Was this my future? Every moment, every tiny thing I saw and did and touched, weighted by loss. Every space in this house andmy town and the world in general, empty in a way that could never be filled.

We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.

You never know what you have till you've lost it.

Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn't magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning.