grief

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

Pressing my head to his heart, I listened hard, straining to hear any gurgle or murmur of life. Hearing nothing, I felt the shock settle into my mind, slowing it down and then turning it off."Don't leave me, Noah. Please, don't go," I whispered into the darkness as the light spray of rain touched my face.If only I could turn back time.I would tell him yes.

Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom!

Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world would give me time. But not now.

He__ passed the longest night of his life locked in mortal combat with his ghosts, calling up and then disavowing twenty years of memories. He would banish that bitch from his heart if it meant cutting her out with his own dagger. And when at last he allowed himself to grieve, he did so silently and unwillingly, his tears hidden by the darkness, his rage congealing into a core of ice.

Maybe heartache was more normal than the absence of it.

Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.

But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.

I could feel their grief as if it were a beast holding us down.

I turned to face Audrey, and everything I loved was right there in her eyes, the memories tangible: the schooldays and sleepovers, the cheap bottles of wine and sappy chick flicks. She was there for my mother__ drunken relapses, there to hold me until I fell asleep the first time the ex from Seattle hit me. It was all there, and my God, each memory was suddenly sacred and the sun rose and set upon it.

...grief is loved turned into an eternal missing. ...It can't be contained in hours or days or minutes.

Fool your heart and take over control if you don't want to be hurt.

Dear Eloisa (said I) there__ no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle. (for I was willing to make light of it in order to comfort her) I beg you would not mind it _ You see it does not vex me in the least; though perhaps I may suffer most from it after all; for I shall not only be obliged to eat up all the Victuals I have dressed already, but must if Henry should recover (which however is not very likely) dress as much for you again; or should he die (as I suppose he will) I shall still have to prepare a Dinner for you whenever you marry any one else. So you see that tho perhaps for the present it may afflict you to think of Henry__ sufferings, yet I dare say he__l die soon and then his pain will be over and you will be easy, whereas my Trouble will last much longer for work as hard as I may, I am certain that the pantry cannot be cleared in less than a fortnight

Sometimes the hardest goodbyes are the ones never said, the ones that always just hang there in the back of the mind like a dark cloud. There's so much to say but no one to say it to because the person you want most to hear it is already gone. That's how he felt. Sorrow, regret, a wound so deep it didn't even bleed. Like a puncture wound, an ache that didn't heal but just hurt. He didn't know if he wanted it to heal. That'd be too much like a final goodbye.

I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could make me stop, and if she died before she had finished comforting me, then I would be left to cry forever.

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

A brave action is often followed by grief. Do not let my resistance to grief stop the brave action.

Grief is the emotional contract of divorce