Quill / Moments / Quotes about grief and loss
Quotes about grief and loss
You wake up, and for a second you haven't remembered. Then you have.
Everyone else went back to normal some weeks ago. You find their handwriting on an old list, or the bin day they always kept track of comes round, or a wave arrives in the middle of a supermarket. Someone asks how you are and you don't know which answer they can take. People in grief often say what helped most was hearing the name said, or a short message on the day, or being spared the need to seem strong.
These lines don't explain the loss, and they don't try to make it smaller. They're written to hold up on an anniversary and on an ordinary Tuesday, and to read as ordinary to anyone glancing at your phone.
The moments
- The first waking moment, remembering again
- A birthday, an anniversary, the first holiday
- Seeing something they would have loved
- A job around the house they used to do
- A wave in a public place
- Finding their handwriting, or a voicemail
- A good day, and the guilt that comes after it
What people say helps
- Someone saying their name and sharing a memory
- A brief message on the day
- Not having to be strong
- Practical help offered specifically, in place of “let me know”
“They're in a better place”, “at least” and “time heals” try to explain or shrink a loss, and people say they'd rather someone stayed and listened.
Quill Originals are written by Quill. Popular sayings are widely repeated lines with no name attached. Lines with a name are checked word for word against public-domain books.
Quill Originals
You can be angry. It's in there too.
Their birthday's a hard day to know what to do with.
Getting up with this is a lot to ask of a morning.
You cried in the toilets at work. Lots of people have.
They were here, and it mattered.
You've been holding it together for other people.
You don't have to sort through anything today.
Another year on the calendar, and they're still gone.
Slowly, then.
A form asked for their name again.
Their song came on in the supermarket.
Take your time.
Some days you feel nothing much, and that's in there too.
However long it's been, you can still miss them this much.
Nobody on this bus knows what you're carrying.
Say fine and go, if that's easiest.
Whatever today is, it's allowed.
There's no right amount of time for this.
No anniversary, no reason, and you miss them.
It's a random Tuesday and you miss them.
The casseroles stopped. It didn't.
A shopping list in their writing can undo a day.
Popular sayings
Crying is not weakness.
Better days are ahead.
From the books
Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.
Read the passage around this line
The tree seeks his solitude of the sky. 79 Man barricades against himself. 80 Your voice, my friend, wanders in my heart, like the muffled sound of the sea among these listening pines. 81 What is this unseen flame of darkness whose sparks are the stars? 82 Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves. 83 He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open. 84 In death the many becomes one; in life the one becomes many. Religion will be one when God is dead. 85 The artist is the lover of Nature, therefore he is her slave and her master.
We can never be really parted.
Read the passage around this line
… If she were I should long to know where she was buried; and to know whether my brother lives, to say Kaddish in memory of her. But I will try not to grieve. I have thought much for so many years of her being dead. And I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We can never be really parted. I think I have never sinned against her. I have always tried not to do what would hurt her. Only, she might be sorry that I was not a good Jewess.”
We come and go, but the land is always here.
Read the passage around this line
“Lou and Oscar can’t see those things,” said Alexandra suddenly. “Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Life is but life, and death but death!
Nature repairs her ravages, but not all.
Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more.
Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not.
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