Ida

“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“That’s why I started writing this story. Those things were just so heavy. It was impossible to carry around all by myself, my real father, Ray’s abuse, your death, so I took them and wrote them down. I edited them and changed the words around, shaping them into something whole. And then I printed them out onto a page, closed the book, and put it on a shelf. And if someone else read my words, then it meant that I wasn’t alone.”
― Aimee Hardy

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet music, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements