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...

To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently {he says everything gently}, Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting...

The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The...

Nothing has changed. It's still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink:...

Harold's Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I...

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the...

Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom.But I did know. was...

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of {it} at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the...

In the months following James' death, on thought had returned time and again as she passed others in the street. What secrets did these people hold? What had they endured? She wondered how many people...

She understood loss, understood how it could leach into every fiber of one's being; how it could dull the shine on a sunny day, and how it could replace happiness with doubt, giving rise to a...

She had learned, long ago and in the intervening years when she was apart from all she loved, that to endure the most troubling times she had to break down time itself--one carefully crafted stitch...

The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?