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.

There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

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 need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone,...

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable. She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar...

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...

Will closed his eyes. He could not hear Jem go, not anymore; he did not want to know the moment when he left and Will was alone, did not want to know when his first day as a Shadowhunter without a...

You know, no one ever appreciates you until you're gone.

Those intricate curves and patterns your people create are beyond human eyes and hands to make. Perhaps we wished to avoid a poor imitation that would only have been an ever-present reminder to us of...

That alas is the way it goes; Something we must rectify. Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his...

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she...

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks...

...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I...

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.

The lost glove is happy.

You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.

Bella: How could I live with myself when it's my fault? None of you should be risking yourselves for me –...

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis...

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory.

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to...

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A...

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.

I knew that somewhere God was laughing. He had taken the other half of my heart, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, and He had done what nothing else could do. By bringing us...

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?

Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between...