Quotes & Sayings About Child Loss

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. — Joan Didion

I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind....

Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child?

And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way,
You don't.
Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.
p112-13 — Brian Doyle

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living. — Alice Sebold

In five minutes, this little thing had come into my life and stared into my eyes and turned me into a different woman. What had I feared? The loss of identity? My time? How stupid and selfish, because holding my child, watching her suckle, every doubt and fear I had about her vanished. I fell, instantly, irreversibly, in love. — Blake Crouch

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation. — Karen Joy Fowler

I loved them too and while you might lay a greater claim to them, I defy you to miss your wife any more than I'll miss my best friend or your child, who was every inch a son to me. — Fiona McIntosh

Difficulty relaxing Insomnia Impatience Taking on too much responsibility Recent major life change (marriage, divorce, birth of child, death of close relative, purchase of home, new job, loss of job, etc.) Irritability Tension headaches Sense of isolation from others Difficulty delegating — Hyla Cass

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. — C.S. Lewis

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit. — Asa Don Brown

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! — Cynthia Ozick

He was staring down another loss, and, though he had to be logical, though he knew her to be logical, he saw the stricken look of betrayal on her face, and all of those arguments threatened to fly away from him. What was history anyway but the lies of the winning few? Why was it worth protecting, when it forgot the starving child under siege, the slave woman on her deathbed, the man lost at sea? It was an imperfect record written by a biased hand, diluted to garner the most agreement from competing parties. He was tempted to see her point, to imagine that she could realign the past and present and future into something beautiful. God, if anyone was capable of it, it would be her. — Alexandra Bracken

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn't here. Before that, my parents weren't here. And before that ... — John Burnside

From a child I was taught to forgive and forget, but it's difficult to forget these things, the loss of parents, of children and grandchildren. — Ann Leckie

It was a phone call she didn't want to make. She didn't want to hurt him. Whatever words she gave him, it would take being a daddy away from him. — Crissi Langwell

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. — Cormac McCarthy

I tell you of loss, my child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours. When you should happen to cry, then cry, knowing that just as easily you will laugh again and cry again. Your feelings will enter the currents of your core and there they shall remain — Thanhha Lai

If somthing is not right or real, dont loss your self. - Clarice Bean Dont look Now — Lauren Child

Would we believe their story; if the dead should return? — Lailah Gifty Akita

Blaming the woman for the loss of a child is like blaming the soldier for the loss of his life in battle. — Katherine Longshore

The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren't needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn't about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been. — Ron Rash

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 fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here
the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay. — Annie Dillard

If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

All over now. He is either in joy or nothingness.
(So why grieve?
The worst of it, for him, is over.)
Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing. — George Saunders

Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she'd been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing. — Maryanne O'Hara

Marilla loved the [more grown up] girl as much as she had loved the child, but she was conscious of a queer sorrowful sense of loss. — L.M. Montgomery

As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's. He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient. — George MacDonald

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child. — Jodi Picoult

The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we've created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past ... Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.'Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present ... Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.' ... In present awareness we are liberated from the past. — Gabor Mate

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example - a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery. — Marilynne Robinson

As an individual, you are entitled to your time of grief, process of grief, and right to grieve. — Asa Don Brown

When the fight ends you can afford to relax. That's the worst part. Winner or loser you have again eyes to see around you. Blood, butchered bodies, bodies pierced by arrows. You stir inside, your heart tightens, the feeling of loss wells up. The sense of smell is the next thing to revive, adding a new dimension of pain. I closed the eyes of the last cadet, blue eyes, unseeing, his body, so small, almost a child, the youngest cadets were all gone, their faces surprised in death. Cold lips never able again to kiss a girl. It's then that the emptiness swallows you and you mourn inside. Damn you, Scharon. No! Damn you, Travellers. — Florian Armas

I also very well remember that on another occasion the father dean said: 'In order that at responsible age a man may be a real man and not a parasite, his education must without fail be based on the following ten principles. 'From early childhood there should be instilled in the child: Belief in receiving punishment for disobedience. Hope of receiving reward only for merit. Love of God - but indiference to the saints. Remorse of conscience for the ill-treatment of animals. Fear of grieving parents and teachers. Fearlessness towards devils, snakes and mice. Joy in being content merely with what one has. Sorrow at the loss of the goodwill of others. Patient endurance of pain and hunger. The striving early to earn one's bread. — G.I. Gurdjieff

Parents who treat the teenager in the same manner in which they treated the child will not experience the same results they received earlier. When the teenager does not respond as the child responded, the parents are now pushed to try something different. Without proper training, parents almost always revert to efforts at coercion, which often lead to arguments, loss of temper, and perhaps, verbal abuse. Such behavior is emotionally devastating to the teenager whose primary love language is words of affirmation. The parents' efforts to verbally argue the teenager into submission are in reality pushing the teenager toward rebellion. — Gary Chapman

There are so many things to grieve ... All the dogs & cats & birds & snakes we have loved & lost, & old lovers, but what else? ... it took me forever to see that one of them was my own daughter, my baby, a young woman I thought of only as a girl, a child, & there she was, suddenly a woman, & I felt this ache gnaw at me as if I hadn't eaten in a year ... I stood there watching my daughter gesture & move & laugh with the grace of a grown-up, & I just started crying like a baby. It wasn't unlike the same type of sorrow we all feel when we realize something we once had that was very precious is not longer there. That it is forever lost, changed, deceased. Like a baby, gone, except in your memory ... My own daughter is now a woman. I get it. Another passage, another form of loss, another reason to grieve, another part of this life process. — Kris Radish

When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under the skin or how to add potatoes to bread to make it heavy so it would fill a stomach faster, she had never explained how she had survived the death of a husband and the loss of a child. Parents never told their real secrets. They never let you know how they lived in the spaces between working and cooking and running after children and counting dollars. — Marisa Silver

Whichever way I went, there would be sadness and a sense of loss. Was this a part of growing up - the agony of making such choices?
If so, I wanted to stay a child forever.

- Ian Carras — Bill Brittain

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.
... I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of teh work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.
As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss. — Madeleine L'Engle

My God, thank you for bringing her. It's like a trip into the past. Hannah looks just like her. My sweet little Terri." And Vanni was reminded, not for the first time, that the loss of a child is probably the most brutal loss of all, no matter that child's age. * — Robyn Carr

She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around. — Becky Chambers

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That's how awful the loss is. — Jay Neugeboren

Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved. — Louise Penny

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I — Richard Ford

One real danger in love relationships is that most people secretly believe that they must control the love object in order to feel safe in loving and being loved. The cause of this is simple - children are made to feel that they must "give themselves up" if they are to be loved. Thus, for most humans the act of surrender has meant the loss of autonomy or worse - loss of one's own mind.
Surrender is neither control nor morbid dependency and cannot be made contingent upon giving away one's "soul"; nonetheless, the person surrendering opens completely to the moment, and runs the risk of being deeply hurt. Sadly, in our society this is not uncommon and frequently serves to harden or embitter a person toward life in general. Or, on the other had being deeply hurt in the act of surrender can lead to angry and painful "cries for help." When this occurs there is an insatiable and wrathful desire to be cared for as a child is cared for and the horrid fear of loss of independence. — Christopher S. Hyatt

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion
like the phantom pain of an amputee. — Khaled Hosseini

Facebook may not only propagate cyber-loneliness but exacerbate the pain of loss that estranged family members feel when they hear only indirectly, through a third-party posting, news of a child or parent with whom they have not spoken in years. — Eugene Kennedy

I know what it's like to lose kits, Oakheart, I wouldn't wish that kind of grief on any cat. — Erin Hunter

In the 1960s there was increasing awareness of the effects of loss and separation on the child. The peak year for documented adoptions by strangers was 1968, and 66 percent of these were babies under one year of age. Agencies began to concern themselves with family dynamic theory and to study the dynamic interplay between the adopted person and other family members. — Joyce Maguire Pavao

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving. — Andrew Solomon

If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead ... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us. — Ann Hood

One can't run in a park without a dog or make angels in the snow without a child and there are things one can't do without a lover, so the loss of the lover is like an amputation and the patient goes into shock. — Merle Shain

Then, as a child does, she grew to accept the first great absence in her life, a weaning from the sure certainty that all children are born with - that it was no country where loss could come their way, that nothing would ever change in that place called home. — Kalyan Ray

Our feelings probably are not less strong at fifty than they were ten or fifteen years before; but they have changed their objects, and dwell on far different prospects. At five-and-thirty a man thinks of what his own existence is; when the maturity of age has grown into its autumn, he is wrapt up in that of others. The loss of wife or child then becomes more deplorable, as being impossible to repair; for no fresh connection can give us back the companion of our earlier years, nor a "new-sprung race" compensate for that, whose career we hoped to see run. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss - you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, " - three," and years later, "Three," she will say, " - four. — Amy Hempel

I had grown accustomed to living within myself. I was resigned to the knowledge that I had lost all appreciation of the outside world, that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of my childhood, and that, in a certain sense, one had to pay for freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of this cherished aura. But now, overjoyed, I saw that all this had only been buried or clouded over and that it was still possible - even if you had become liberated and had renounced your childhood happiness - to see the world shine and to savor the delicious thrill of the child's vision. — Hermann Hesse

The dead person once had a life! This is a misery? — Lailah Gifty Akita

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other. — Paul Harding

I'm tired of everyone looking at me with pity in their eyes. I'm tired of feeling like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every damned day. I'm tired of waking up in the morning, and then remembering ... — A.B. Shepherd

In the attempt to find the just measure of horror and terror, I came upon the writing of Carole Gill whose work revealed a whole new dimension to me. The figure of the gothic child was there. Stoker's horror was there. Along with the romance! At the heart of her writing one stumbles upon a genuine search for that darkness we lost with the loss of Stoker."

~Dr. Margarita Georgieva ~ Gothic Readings in The Dark — Carole Gill

Laws on killing, even God's demands, didn't allow for peace. Not always. There'd still be pain; missing that child would break her parents' hearts. But what Helen knew, what she'd seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody. — Alan Heathcock

We have observed, through our own experiences and those of others, that one never gets over the loss of a brother or a child or a spouse, or any dearly loved one; one simply learns to live life differently, with a sort of a hole in the heart. The wound in the heart heals over, but the tender scar remains. — Scott Rosenow

There is no greater grief, than when a parent losses a child. — Asa Don Brown

If we can prevent just one marriage from disintegrating--or just one child from suffering the loss of a family--our effort will be justified. — James C. Dobson

There are words like 'orphan', 'widow' and 'widower' in all languages. But there is no word in any language to describe a parent who loses a child. How does one describe the pain of 'ultimate bereavement'! (Page 50) — Neena Verma

Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

There is nothing redemptive about the loss of a child, no lessons of value it can teach you. It is too big, too overwhelming, too black to articulate. It is a bleak, overwhelming physical pain, shocking in its intensity, and every time you think you might have moved forward an inch it swells back, like a tidal wave, to drown you again. — Jojo Moyes

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. — Matthew Sanford

I recognized that Christianity had taught me that sacrifice is the way of life. I forgot the neighbor who raped me, but I could see that when theology presents Jesus' death as God's sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive.

But what if this is not true? What if nothing, or very little, is saved? What if the consequence of sacrifice is simply pain, the diminishment of life, fragmentation of the soul, abasement, shame? What if the severing of life is merely destructive of life and is not the path of love, courage, trust, and faith? What if the performance of sacrifice is a ritual in which some human beings bear loss and others are protected from accountability or moral expectations? — Rebecca Ann Parker

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?' — Tom Hiddleston

Poor William!" said he, "dear lovely child, he now sleeps with his angel mother! Who that had seen him bright and joyous in his young beauty, but must weep over his untimely loss! To die so miserably; to feel the murderer's grasp! How much more a murderer, that could destroy such radiant innocence! Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we; his friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest. The pang is over, his sufferings are at an end for ever. A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. He can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that for his miserable survivors. — Mary Shelley

Standing on the edge with my patients - abiding with them - means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could. — Christine Montross

Are there not a thousand forms of sorrow? Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world, a man who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feelings any more than we have words for our thoughts. — Ethan Canin

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you? — Dan Chaon

I was eight years old when my father was murdered. It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder ... But even as a child, one thing was clear to me: I didn't want the killer, in turn, to be killed. I remember lying in bed and praying, Please, God. Please don't take his life, too. I saw nothing that could be accomplished in the loss of one life being answered with the loss of another. — Kerry Kennedy

After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people. — Ernesto Che Guevara

There's a scream that can't be silenced.It's rising, growing louder and louder. It's the scream of a child abandoned, suddenly long ago. As the scream echoed then in that alley, it echoes now in my mind. It penetrates all the dark places. It slams into the loss, bounces against the regret.. and the pain. — Tom Taylor

Her mother's quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline's despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live. — Pamela Erens

So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend. — Orson Scott Card

I hardly dare believe it after that horrible day last summer. I have had a heart ache ever since then. But it is gone now."
"This baby will take Joy's place." Said Marilla.
"Oh, no no no Marilla. He can't, nothing can ever do that. He has his own place, my dear wee man child. But little Joy has hers, and always will have it. — L.M. Montgomery

You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You'll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you. — Charles Lee

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. — Judith Lewis Herman

But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing - that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the Children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck trough the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning ... Every night a world created, complete with furniture- friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus. — John Steinbeck

Sometimes it's hard to see the rainbow when there's been endless days of rain. — Christina Greer

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you. — Barbara Kingsolver

As a child I experienced loss for what I felt was withheld from me: the delicious milk, the mountains of flowers I could not roll in, the cousins I could not play with, a beautiful house on a plateau. As the years grew with me, I became aware of absences that impacted me directly and indirectly: the loss of place, of stories, of family and of citizenship. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

He would not want to sound like a haunted man; he would not want to sound as though he was calling from a welfare hotel, years too late, to say Yes, that was a baby we had together, it would have been a baby. For he could not help now but recall the doctor explaining about that child, a boy, who had appeared so mysteriously perfect in the ultrasound. Transparent, he had looked, and gelatinous, all soft head and quick heart; but he would have, in being born, broken every bone in his body. — Gish Jen

There's just no love like the love of a mother for a child, no matter how that child comes into their life, and no loss or grief to match it. — Nora Roberts

She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she'd been born into, I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, she
loved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe from
the tragic rains of her fate. — Susan Abulhawa

Embrace the pain — Jude Gibbs

She wondered how to mourn the death of a son who wasn't dead. And yet the loss of separation made that easy. The idea of pain made pain, where she knew none could possibly truly exist. — Juliet Castle

The loss of my child broke my spirit. — Asa Don Brown

Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release. He was not an especially contemplative person, and he did not dwell on this. But by October there were many days when the swell of rightness, loose-limbedness, and gentle gravity came to him. It recalled to him being a child, when he found one day he could finally color within the lines. — Elizabeth Strout

The process of grief and loss is as unique as your personal DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid); no two individuals will have the same experiences or relationship to grief. — Asa Don Brown

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick ... But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye? — Lisa See

He was still so very young. Faeries - true faeries, not their changeling throwaways - live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it's over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He'd never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.
But he didn't. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him. — Seanan McGuire

think of Halley - the first time we met, on the first day of Basic, bunkmates by the luck of the alphabet - and I feel a profound gratitude for the interrupted, hectic, and strange relationship we've had, intense and exciting despite all the obstacles thrown into our path by an uncaring military. I think of Mom, and about the sadness she will feel at the loss of her only child, but I'm glad that we got to spend some time together just before I shipped out on this particular goat rope. — Marko Kloos

I saw something I could never forget. I saw lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and understanding in a child's eye. It was the worst thing I would ever witness. — Shannon A. Thompson

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. — Alice Miller

That evening I sat across from Jeremy Bulloch and Jacob at the dinner table. I watched as Jeremy, who seemed to speak Jacob's silent language fluently, drummed his fingers up and down on the edge of the table, as if playing a piano. A delighted Jacob mimicked the actor's actions. My throat filled with tears. I met Ben's eyes across the table, where he sat straight with pride next to his son. He was enjoying the show just as much as I was. Jacob was in his element, interacting with an actor from his favorite movie. The other men at the table were part of the set: Mike, the owner of the comic book store, who had made the entire thing possible, and the Mandalorin Mercs, new friends of the little boy who had
become one of their own, a comrade in distress. — Mary Potter Kenyon