Without You Quotes

“Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.”
― Anthony Rapp, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical 'Rent'

“On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse.

"There was this little boy I was taking care of," she said "and he was terminally ill,and we all knew it,but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn't die, it was so sad.
And his parents were always there with him,giving him so much love and support,but he was in so much pain,and it really was,time for him to go.
So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, 'You have to tell your son it's okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.' And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over, that it was okay for him to go,and,well,after a few moments,his son died.”
― Anthony Rapp, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical 'Rent'

“When Bill died, I was for the first time faced with the loss of a friend, and what I initially felt when I read the news of his death in the New York Times—he had died suddenly of a heart attack—was numbness and shock. I kept thinking I should have felt more pain or sadness or grief or something. I kept trying to figure out how to grieve properly. While I was trying to sort out my response to Bill’s death, I had a conversation over lunch with my ex-boyfriend Keith, who had remained a good friend after we’d split up. He’d always been a great sounding board and an uncommonly clearheaded source of wisdom and advice.

“I don’t know what to do about all this,” I told him. “I don’t know how to process it.”

“Well,” he said, leaning forward intensely, as he always did when he talked, his right hand chopping the air, his boyish face bobbing up and down, “the thing is, the thing is, when you have someone you know who’s died, you have to grieve, of course, but really, there are different things you have to grieve.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, you have to grieve the loss of the person, you know, the fact that the actual person won’t be there anymore to talk to, to laugh with, to share memories with, that sort of thing.”

“Right.”

“And then you have to, you have to mourn the loss of who that person held you to be. Because that dies with them. Their vision of you no longer exists. And a whole world of who you are is gone. So you have to mourn that, too.”

I sat there and took that in, an electric current of recognition coursing through my body.

“That…makes sense,” I said.

Keith nodded vigorously. “Yeah, it does. It does.”

I shook my head. “How do you know all this stuff?” It was a question I often asked Keith; he and I were the same age, but his insight into profound human matters often outshined my own.

He laughed a high-pitched giggle. “I don’t know.” That was always his answer.”
― Anthony Rapp, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical 'Rent'

“It was my kind of song: fast and fun and exuberant,the lyrics tumbling out almost faster than my ears could follow them,some times rhyming,sometimes not. . .”
― Anthony Rapp, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical 'Rent'