Melissa Quotes

“The hurt means you're alive. It means your body is reacting and willing to fight - both to fight back and fight through it. So rather than running from grief's harsh reality, you may find that in letting it groan and pierce and ache and cry, you begin to exhaust some of its staying power. You expose its secret hiding places. You force it into the open air where it can be more easily outlined and dealt with.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“More important, I know what I've seen God do, up close, right here in my own family, silently comforting us inside closets of darkness so black and siffocating I didn't realize they actually existed on earth and, if they did, how they could possibly be endured.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“And I beg you to try rallying enough courage to tell them what's going on so they can support you with their love and sit with you in your sadness.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“You must keep your senses trained to the presence of new or repeat thought patterns, not allowing them eight-lane freedom to run up and down inside your head without being pulled over for closer inspection. Staying renewed in mind means keeping the floodlights on and the alarm systems triggered, ever on the watch for intruders into your mental living space.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“The fact is, taking your honest self to God, even with all its raw emotion and blinding grief, is exactly the place you need to take it. If the alternative is to dump your anger on others, especial in the form of indirect critisism and personal attack, you'll find much less to clean up later if you just pour it out in prayer to the One who can actually do something with it. If the alternative is to stow it all away in a hidden tank deep within your heart, afraid of offending God by speaking it aloud, then you're better of releasing the valve in frank communication with your heavenly Father than cramming all that pain and suffering into tight living quarters that will never be able to hold it.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“He is willing to just sit with us in our grief and not judge us for being so lost about what to do.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“And He never stops absorbing the part of our pain we could never endure without Him.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“But answers to questions this large and complex must be given the space of days and time to unfold themselves. By scrawling your own punctuation, forcing by suicide to turn the question mark into a period, you close out a sentence that still contains all the potential elements of a good story. You shut the book before it's had a chance to show you where God is going with all this background material.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“So let us step into this river of peace - bravely, willingly - undaunted by the swiftness of the current and the unknowns of the passage ahead.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“And even if prayer seems futile and unnecessary, even if tears are quite often your only food - "day and night," as the psalmist said (Ps. 42:3) - hope still lives because God still loves.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide