grieving

At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.

This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep your porch, go drink coffee in the shade of the trumpet vines. You have days where you want to lay down and die, but what you learn is this: As long as there's somebody left on this earth who loves you, it's reason enough to stay alive. You don't give in to your broke heart-- you just let the wide, cracked space fill up again.

Like my loved one, I am convinced that we all have critical conditions. Battles that we undertake behind the hospitals, in lonely alleys, secret locations and sometimes public places that are out of reach to those who seem to care.

He means to make his subjects merciful and wise; sorrow and struggle bringeth both. We will, he tells me, grow by grieving, live by dying, love by losing. The heart itself is the field of battle and the garden green.

You__e got to trust yourself. Be gentle with yourself. And listen to yourself. You__e the only person who can get you through this now. You__e the only one who can survive your story, the only one who can write your future.All you__e got to do, when you__e ready, is stand up, {and begin again.}

He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

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)

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

...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)

He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.

The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.

She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

The dirty secret she__ learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you__ once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. __ou might imagine I__ coping day by day,_ she murmured. __ut it__ more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.

There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.