loss

There is no loss bigger than losing your manuscript, not even love.

You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.

A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.

I wish to go down under the waters__he cool, crystalline waters that I knew, where allthat is, here, existing, isis only to be lost within the susurrationsand the rumours of water and the evening starwe wait for...

Losing something or someone you love hurts. I don__ understand, fully, why having to say goodbye wounds us so deeply but I do know that loss is part of God__ plan. On this side of heaven nothing is permanent. He gives and takes away. What we do in between that time of His giving and His taking is where you__l find His blessings. Be thankful for the gift that was given_no matter how short. Be thankful.

We hold on so tightly, because we__e terrified of loss. We hold on till our hands bleed. And in that self-shattering persistence, we fail to see the answer: Just let go.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent--holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.

Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a __oom lens effect,_ in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

We don't know predestined ways,or what future might behold,someone leaves,someone remains,and new things replace the old.We don't know a thing for sure,what's today,is there tomorrow?Yet,somehow we still endure,through those moments filled with sorrow.Can we really be mistaken,trying just the best we can?something's given and some taken,never knowing how nor when.We don't know that much,it's true,life's a mystery divine,a day came,when i lost you,treasured guiding star of mine.

I think it was C.S. Lewis that asked, 'Do not most people simply drift away?'. I've always been a reader and for the longest time that stuck with me because I was at war with it. How can people 'simply' drift away?

When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under the skin or how to add potatoes to bread to make it heavy so it would fill a stomach faster, she had never explained how she had survived the death of a husband and the loss of a child. Parents never told their real secrets. They never let you know how they lived in the spaces between working and cooking and running after children and counting dollars.

I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one.

It is a defeat of the spirit to learn one's arrogance causes such loss and pain. Pride invites you to soar to heights and the footing, tentative. farther, then, is the fall.

What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can__ penetrate._people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.What am I living on? Someone said the other day, __hat old irrepressible-impossible- hope._ And I thought no, this doesn__ feel like hope. But maybe that__ what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?Hope has to do with continuing, that__ all_I can imagine now, where I couldn__ before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one__ strength, until what__ left is tenuous, transparent.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

Severed and gone, so many years! And art thou still so dear to me, That throbbing heart and burning tears Can witness how I cling to thee?

Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.