When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

One hundred eighty days, Aislinn. Seth's been gone for one hundred eighty days, and I've watched you try to pretend it doesn't hurt for every one of them. Can't I try to make you happy?

They wouldn't have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way.

I wiped my hands on my apron and went to the window. Outside, the prairie reached out and touched the places where the sky came down. Though the winter was nearly over, there were patches of snow and...

Remembering our loved ones is breathing life into their fading images, that we might once more see their faces and pass along a tearful I miss you.

He made my mom call and tell Maureen I wouldn't be in to see her anymore. He said therapy is a waste of money. He also told her to upgrade the cable service and to order him a subscription to Military...

They say that when you're about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. They never tell you that when you watch someone you once loved dying, hovering between this life and the next, it's twice as...

He took deep breaths. He wanted to sleep. At least in sleeping, he could find a kind of peace. At least in sleeping, he could dream about his dead friends and maybe, until the sun came up, feel like...

... beneath torrents of spring rain, buds come to life - and we do too, beneath torments of tears...

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that...

Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.

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...

For a long time, there was grief. It pulled me down into suffocating darkness, and kept me anchored there. I went through the motions. I turned up at school. I ate food and watched TV and took algebra...

For my grief's so great That no supporter but the huge firm earth Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. {Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1}

If he didn't love so deeply, he couldn't grieve so deeply. But he's drowning in it.

I do not know, nor do I care to remember The time in which I knew distinctly that you were gone You fade in and out of memory Upon which I can not feign to touch Or feel How cruel to leave me With...

I had no tears to shed nor a prayer for the deceased... There is no hope for the hopeless.

There are words like 'orphan', 'widow' and 'widower' in all languages. But there is no word in any language to describe a parent who loses a child. How does one describe the pain of 'ultimate...

Grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us, the mirrors how to reflect us, the walls how to contain us. Grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or...

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.

"And then the sobbing. Again the soft but sharp crying, and sorrow making his body recoil. - They have killed your father. - And who killed you, mother?"

I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.

People always stay the age that they died at. My big brother died of leukemia when I was six. He was eight. Now when I think of him, he's always eight, and he's still my big brother. He never changes,...

I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn't think of a time when I'd acted on my own, when I wasn't driven by my...

Why do you cry for someone else? Save your tears for your own time of mourning, when you are alone! When loneliness wants to break your heart and you have no one...

You know the truth. Evie's never coming back. And the sooner you make your peace with that, the sooner you can start to heal.

Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here....

You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.