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October 1 - October 7, 2021
My world stopped while everything continued on around me.
When you’re grieving, sometimes your only constant companion is a book.
The truth is that grief can make you feel like you’re going crazy. Grief can make a liar out of you. You say you’re doing fine, when really your heart is shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.
It’s the opening up to the exquisite pain of absence. It’s the moment when you stop trying to move on or change how much it hurts, and just let it out.
I think that there is a fear that if you start crying you are never going to be able to stop.
know that the only thing that really lasts forever is love,
Even after the funeral, she often thought he still might just be on a trip. This was still denial working very subtly, to give her moments away from her pain.
Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.
You may also be angry that you’re left behind and you should have had more time together.
It was not supposed to happen, or at least not now.
The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.
Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.
You wonder if you will ever feel anything again or if this is what life will be like forever.
We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing.
The more of your identity that was connected to your loved one, the harder it will be to do this.
You knew your loved one in a way that no one else ever did or ever will.
Your life has been out of balance and will be for some time. It will take time to find a new balance.
Life is usually shorter than we hoped, and we are often unprepared for loss.
We will always have a dream unfulfilled, a wish not yet granted.
Regrets are of the heart, the yearning for more and the chance to always do it better. Regrets will always belong to the past.
It would be unrealistic to have done everything in life.
We need to know that as the physical form of our loved one leaves, something beyond them lingers and comforts us, something beyond our ability to describe or substantiate.
“You have not lost all of the things that you loved most about your loved one. They are in you. You can carry them with you for the rest of your life.”
Can you be fully living if you don’t grieve your loss?
How can I explain to them that grief is not finite? There is nothing static about loss; it keeps changing, just like we do.”
Nature has a way of healing the soul.
It is an illusion that we know everything about each other or that we even should.
A part of the old you died with your loved one. And a part of your loved one lives on in the new you.
And no matter how much time someone had, no matter how full the life was, it is still a deep loss for us.
When someone dies in their twenties or thirties, we grieve not only for the person but for the years unlived, for all that might have been but wasn’t.
Grief is the healing process that ultimately brings us comfort in our pain.
“The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
I have learned there is no joy without hardships, no pleasure without pain. If not for death, would we appreciate life?
It is not just about the life lost but also the life lived.
Those whom we have loved and who loved us in return will always live on in our hearts and minds.
You can find gratitude for the time you and your loved one shared together, as short as that seems to have been.
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.
