grief-and-loss

Grief, as in everything, should be experienced in moderation. There is a time to grieve heavily but then there is a time to set it aside and become happy in life again.

The truth of it was he didn't want her. He wanted Mary Kate with every cell of his body. He missed everything about her. The feel of her sleeping at his side. Her gentle snores. Her soft brown curls tickling his nose enough to wake him from a sound sleep even on nights when he needed it most. Her smile. The smell of her. At odd moments he thought he had heard her laughter, or he'd catch a glimpse of her in the corner of an eye, but all of it was a lie, and every time it happened it was as if someone had ripped a deep wound in his chest. The pain was raw enough to make him want to take a razor to his wrist, but each time he considered acting upon the idea something stopped him, and so, he stumbled on barely alive and wishing for an end. At times he couldn't breathe, couldn't move without wanting to scream.

Maybe there is no one way to deal with grief, but knowing that we're not totally alone is the best we can do.

To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who__ disappeared, I said over and over again: __veryone is dead._ If they insisted, showing me family photos, I__ calmly say: __ere there any children? Not a single child will come back._ I didn__ mince my words, I didn__ try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I__ become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people__ tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

Sweetheart, I__ telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn__ matter if you had thirty years,_ she tells me. __t wouldn__ be enough.

On grief. We know where we've been. We know where we want to be.

When you lose someone you love, it's hard to imagine that you'll ever feel better. That, one day, you'll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order. But it does happen. If you're patient and you work at it.

I discover, too, that grief is different to different people. Comes in many guises. In shocked silences and closed doors around our village, as people try to shut it out. That a blank face or fleeting smile can hide the worst, most private kind of agony.

If you love someone and they vanish, you are left nodding like a zombie and throwing teacups at a wall.

Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.

My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, And it is still itself.

I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.

The closet bond that we share with our brethren is that of grief. Every community knows sorrow.

Every road leads to sorrow. All aspects that make life beautiful _ friendship, love, art, and truth _ will end. All aspects that make life hideous _ pain, poverty, illness, betrayal, hate, crime, war _ will also end. The fact that human life is a mere blip on a cosmic scale is no reason for personal angst as we came from nothingness and will return to the great void that birthed us.

But the place where we're most broken, most empty of ourselves... is the place where we can be filled in a way that is harder for people who haven't experienced a loss.

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

Grief is part of my human experience. There will always be loss during my lifetime. Loss has come in a variety of forms to me__uch as death, divorce, losing a job, and selling a beloved home. Each event brought me new opportunities and experiences that would not have been possible otherwise.

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.