death-of-a-loved-one

As David Zucker watched the casket of his late wife being lowered into the ground, he thought the worst must surely be over and it was time to start the slow healing process to begin life anew.

You're too damn beautiful for your own good.Hell,you're too damn beautiful for my own good

Has your life ever been so messed up that you wondered how you would survive another day?

...nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother's machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a light and leaving a room.

She said, "Well, that's right, she's going to heaven very soon. And now it's time for us to say good-bye to her and tell her how much we love her."Mary martha nodded and looked at the needlepoint in her hands."Will her brain still be hurt, in heaven?" she asked.[Rebecca]....said, "Do you remember that time at the beach, when you went into the water with Gran-Gran and the waves were too big and she lifted you up over them? And you two were laughing so much and you said she was the coolest grandmother in the world?"Mary Martha smiled. "Yes""That is how she will be in heaven," Rebecca said.

once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)

By noon, silence arrives one last time, flowing into every space of her room. And before long, silence swallows sound and color and seconds and equations and entire stanzas of old poetry, leaving new words. The sheets are breathless. The room is bruised.My mother is still warm.

The departed souls shall never return.

We need not fear death, for it is simply the next phase of life. We never die, we simply change form - just as we have since the day we were born.

Our atheist thoughts go out to his family following their loss.

My heart felt withered, a neglected fruit that would never again sweeten, now that my love was dead.

Kiss someone like it's the last one you give.

It is finally about the quality of the conversations and silences we share, isn't it? We become strangers when we have nothing to say to each other. We die to each other, when the conversations in us die. Sometimes, a little every day, until one day we go completely silent and we are simply left looking at a stranger whose habits we know

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.

Some people walk into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts. Others walk into our lives and we want to leave footprints on their face!

Steven and I had always come to the market to check out the fresh flowers, so when Friday came around with the fresh roses, I always stood in the middle of it all, breathing in the memories and breathing out the hurt.