loss

Grief can destroy you__r focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn__ allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it__ over and you__e alone, you begin to see it wasn__ just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can__ get off your knees for a long time, you__e driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. __nd the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

Somehow the thought she might be next wasn't nearly as terrifying as the realization he was gone.

It's what happens. You love, then you lose, then you die. Even if you survive, you die.

I don__ know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I__ sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there__ room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future_

No more running, no more half living, starving or fear. You have it better than me now, I think.

More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. Regret. Remorse. Longing. Hunger. Terror. It was getting so hard to tell the difference between any of those things. If she'd ever been able to. If anyone really could.

Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests.

Your laugh is of the sardonic kind.

Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

I have loved and lost many a time, but along the way I have found myself.

There is more than one way to lose your life; quickly through violence, or fettered-away and wasted around dreadful, toxic people.

On the morning of what should have been Amelia Ashley's birthday, the river valley that had once housed High Bridge changed for Joshua Mayhew. For the first time in many years, it seemed beautiful to him. For the first time in many years, it was beautiful.

When the heart is heavy, the hands crave work

I know this: there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain at losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.

It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself.

Loss taught me the value of tears. Just as the rains come down to wash away debris and dust, tears unleashed can bring relief.

Lost. The therapist made it sound as if the person could be found. As if death wasn__ final and irrevocable.

She had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.