The Madness of Grief Quotes

“was early, just after opening time, and there were not many people about but a woman, well dressed, stopped me and said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear your news.’ I thanked her, and she told me that she was a widow too. Tears came to my eyes and she took my arm. ‘I know, I know.’ ‘What do I need to know?’ I asked. She thought about that for a moment and said, ‘People will never be as nice to you again as now, so get the most out of it.’ It made me laugh.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“When your partner dies they take with them your future.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I did find that I remembered who delivered, and who did not, and while I have not trimmed the Christmas card list as a result, I have, without conscious decision, resolved to spend what limited resources of time and attention I have on people who wish to return them in roughly the same proportion.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“This is what I wanted. I wanted old, close friends to be strong and steady and present. I did not want to be left alone to grieve, I did not want to pretend that I was all right, I did not want people to look away nervously if I began to cry. Not everyone can do this, for all sorts of reasons, and if you can be forgiving, forgive it, because deaths and bereavement are difficult to handle and not everyone does it well.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I was suddenly hit by grief, the blows which come when you find continuing existence in the things that were theirs: name tags, voicemail messages, incoming mail.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Self-pity is neither attractive nor helpful”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“as you live on you realise we are not so much the authors of our lives but a library of other people.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“My first defence against being overwhelmed by grief was organisation.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Life, towards its end, gets thin.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I understood now how we want to attach our bereavements to bigger bereavements, and to this, the biggest bereavement of all, so that our stories are taken up in this big story, given visibility and importance, and we need that because we fear and know that the death which gradually erases them will come for us and erase us too.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“grief is like reverse anticipation, keeping you awake with sudden and vivid memories.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I realised that I was a sort of walking social IED, a threat to the unwary, and with the potential to upset everyone unpredictably.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“This time my wounds are not visible, and there is no uniform for the bereaved, the black armband, the bordered calling-card, the curtains drawn at noon. Your loss is pretty much invisible, unless people know about it, and you live and walk in the land of the not-yet bereaved, and should your wounds suddenly show people may recoil, or be struck dumb with embarrassment, or inadvertently say the wrong thing.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Chronic illness does this, not only robbing you of the joint enterprise that you loved to do, but turning the solo version of it into something you can no longer enjoy.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I felt a surge of rage and wanted to scream at him I HAVE JUST LOST THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, CAN’T YOU TELL? Could anyone tell? I felt like a leper in those first days of grief, wrapped in my misfortune, sounding like a broken bell, and contagious with bad luck, so I imagined people kept their distance from me.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“There are no words …’ There are only words, but they are inadequate, and when people ask me how I am, and want to know, I find it harder and harder to answer.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Driving while grief-stricken is not to be recommended.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I then went and sat on the sofa and cried. I am rarely moved to tears by things in life, art is another matter, but there is a hygienic purpose to weeping in the first days of grief, a discharge of sorrows that would otherwise disable you, and sometimes weeping came upon me like nausea on a pitching deck, and if I were with people I would hasten away from occupied spaces to find an unoccupied space in which to bawl. They felt too like reverse peristalsis, and would pass in a couple of minutes, and leave me feeling empty, not an unpleasant feeling when you have been full of grief, which sits in you like an indigestible lump of whale meat – not that I have ever eaten whale meat.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“they are kind, but everyone flinches at making a faux pas, and at death stepping, trespassing, into their day a little bit.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I wonder now if she saw what was coming, but had not yet arrived, the questions that come when you are untimely bereaved. Could I have done more? Could I have prevented this? Could I have been kinder, not to myself but to him? These pressed at the edge of consciousness, like shoppers at Harrods’ door on the first morning of the sales, but I was not admitting them yet.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“In shock we repeat the repertoire of the everyday.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I did not know what I wanted to do because I had just been blown up.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“The piercing grief is less frequent but in its place is an occasional visit from cold, stony grief, that comes up from depths.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I have found that when someone is dying the convenience of others, denied at first, becomes a more powerful factor in deciding what to do and what not to do, as the hours become days.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“did know that he loved me and that I loved him, and that nothing could have separated us apart from what was separating us, so I did not fret too much about leaving anything unsaid.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“It is the worst moment, when you realise what you have woken up to, the opposite of that feeling of immense relief when you wake from a nightmare, then remember it is not real. This is the nightmare you wake into.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Why is it so affecting? Because he is innocent of what is to come, the shadow that fell across his life and shortened it and took him away.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“And now it has all gone, and when I look ahead I see nothing.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“But I did feel guilty; guilty that I was unable to prevent what was happening, guilty that I did not summon help sooner, guilty that I had not been kinder, guilty that I had not been able to save him. That spiralled quickly, and sucked up the air and grew noisy, like a twister, and I knew I had to let it go.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. One day follows another and I do what I have to do but I feel like I’ve smoked a bale of weed and I am standing in a motorway service station dressed as a velociraptor surrounded by broken crockery and everyone’s gone quiet.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss