Distress Signals Quotes

“Someone would later tell me that denial, the first stage of grief, isn’t big and simple, like refusing to accept that someone is dead when all the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that they are. No. The real work of denial, the true intricacy of it, takes place beneath the thoughts your consciousness articulates in the nanoseconds before it does. It happens when you are presented with a set of circumstances that any person not in denial would immediately find worrying but, because you are in the midst of it, the roots of every fear bend and break, re-forming into plausible possibilities that cause you no concern. Denial is forcing boring, pedestrian explanations out of your synapses, growing them thick and uncontrolled like vines on a time-lapse video. Constantly and quickly, so nothing logical has a chance to squeeze through.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, Distress Signals

“It’s a manageable feeling with an end date when that person is coming back, but a drowning depth of pain and hopelessness when they are not. It might be interminable. I couldn’t even say if it would ever end, or even fade. How could I even face the future like this? What if I always felt this way? How could anyone learn to live with this?”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, Distress Signals