loss

I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

You may cry out tears for misplacing your money, but you got to cry out blood if you have misplaced your dreams. Sadly, you may not even know the great deal of influence you loss when you misplace your dreams, so how will you cry for such a loss?

It's my own deep-rooted feeling that our souls never truly die and that life continues in some way. I know I need to have patience as my beliefs continue to evolve with my personal growth. As I've looked around at the things I do have in my life, I've gradually started to trust in life again, little by little. I think, "How could all of these other amazing things come into my life if there was not something larger than me?

I believe I gather strength from the generations of women who came before me - that together we all hold the suffering of the world.

Nothing is really lost as long as you remember it

I didn't know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters.

In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read "Be nice to me, I'm grieving," or "Don't tick me off; I've already got the world on my shoulders," or maybe even "BEWARE - don't upset the widow!" I needed a variety of signs that I could switch out depending on my daily mood.

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her__o freeze her in my mind so I wouldn__ forget her__ut instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she__ stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too__rifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep__ sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn__ actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.

Jealousy is a mortal emotion. One that means I feel I have something to lose--something that, if gone, will tear away a part of me.

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

The intense roller coaster of emotions will gradually lesson over time. But there is no timeframe for the grieving process, and it will not be rushed, no matter how fast you'd like to "get over it." The reality is that there is no getting over it; you can only walk through it.

You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.

This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.

The only way past the pain is through it. Pain, grief, anger, misery...they don't go away--they just increase and compound and get worse. You have to live through them, acknowledge them. You have to give your pain its due.

It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye.