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.

... 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.

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 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}

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.

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?"

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'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.

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world...

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.

Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not seems.'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,...

I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost.

If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good...

Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.