Bereavement Quotes

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

All of our suffering in life is from saying we want one thing and doing another.

Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.

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 it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps.

When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.

You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

A saved soul has many sorrows. They have their share of bereavements, deaths, disappointments , crosses. What shall enable a believer to bear all this? Nothing but the consolation there is in Christ.

Grief is a process, not a state.

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.

She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.

Heaven and God are best discerned through tears; scarcely perhaps are discerned at all without them. The constant association of prayer with the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death suffice to show this.

Farewell is said by the living, in life, every day. It is said with love and friendship, with the affirmation that the memories are lasting if the flesh is not.

If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

To lose what we have never owned might seem an eccentric bereavement, but Presumption has its own affliction as well as claim.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

One often calms one's grief by recounting it.

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.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.

I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on

It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. . . . Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.

Attachments and bereavements are inseparable.

A thousand goodbyes come after death - the first six months of bereavement.

When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.

I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.

That what?" "That I knew i misjudged you. That you love him. I'm not saying In what way. Maybe you don't know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him," he says gently.

The few certainties in our existences are pain, death and bereavement.

Condole - to show that bereavement is a smaller evil than sympathy.

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night.

Not a sorrow, not a burden, not a temptation, not a bereavement, not a disappointment, not a care, not a groan or tear, but has its antidote in God's rich and inexhaustible resources.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.