grief

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you__ think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

We'd all mourn for a while, but at the end of the day we were a tough lot, and we'd survive.

The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.

He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face.

Your whole world ceases to exist and you're nothing but a shell of a person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it her way, me in mine, and you in yours," he said, lifting his hand off of John's gravestone and rising. "Your mom hates the world, I avoid it, and you try to save it.

The ocean-blue bowl won__ refuse to bruise, won__ hold it back from the gaping earth-wounds.There will still come water, chill wind and happy goosebumps, and in the utmost corners of oaks, leaves laughing.

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground _ I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation _ Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there _ the walls and the chairs and the children__ pictures on the walls _ meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

It's not that I am not moved by these things, that I don't them in my life. But lately, their power has diminished." - 140

Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times--- his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age in his sleep, who are we to call it injustice?

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds that sees into the bottom of my grief?

My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?""When you vomit blood,sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly.That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.-Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende.