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.

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...

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...

"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,...

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...

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.

It was like someone had died- like I had died. Because it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole...

What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something...

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death-his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently-"shrewdly" and "reasonably"-she is taking him to a teeming petri...

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that...

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.

In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe...

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now...

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a...

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at...

A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book.You cannot hope to console...