Quotes & Sayings About Coping With Loss

That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend - if he concentrates - are Willem's arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it. — Hanya Yanagihara

Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her ankle, 'This isn't me! This is not who I am! — Mira Bartok

The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day. — Frank Beddor

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need. — Michelle Latiolais

Life simply blew through her. — Valeria Kogan

Dr. R scratches out a note on his pad.
"Losing you both was only the practice pain, wasn't it? For my mum and dad ... "
He puts his finger on his lips, his elbow at his chest, not racked with cancer. "Yes."
"And when that happens, this will seem like nothing."
He nods.
"When it happens," he asks me, "what will get you through?"
"Friends who love me."
"And if your friends weren't there?"
"Music through headphones."
"And if the music stopped?"
"A sermon by Rabbi Wolpe."
"If there was no religion?"
"The mountains and the sky."
"If you leave California?"
"Numbered streets to keep me walking."
"If New York falls into the ocean?"
Your voice in my head. — Emma Forrest

The dirty secret she'd learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you'd once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. "You might imagine I'm coping day by day," she murmured. "But it's more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute. — Susan Dormady Eisenberg

There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss. — Jane Hamilton

---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before. — Ashley Hay

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness - it was scarred and worn beyond repair — Andrea Lochen

Grieving is not a race, nor is it a predictable experience - it is as unique as each and every one of us. Therefore by creating your own path you will find your own way through. — Corrie Sirota

What is coping? This is what it is like: a cave underground deep in rock, hung across its roof with accretions of dripping salts. I am cavernous and hard as mineral. The cave holds a pool of dark water that has not seen light. The water is very cold; it is undrinkable and its size is unmapped. It is mine, but people cannot see it. Only Ev sometimes senses that it is there. All the time people say that I am coping very well. It is impossible to explain my strategy to them. It is opaque even to me. — Marion Coutts

We all handle loss in our individual ways, grieve in all kinds of ways. We all go through feeling okay sometimes, but other times, we feel so bad we hurt ourselves or those around us. — E. Journey

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash. — Joyce Carol Oates

She had worn the Morgenstern ring since Jace had left it for her, and sometimes she wondered why. Did she really want to be reminded of Valentine? And yet, at the same time, was it ever right to forget?
You couldn't erase everything that caused you pain with its recollection. She didn't want to forget Max or Madeleine, or Hodge, or the Inquisitor, or even Sebastian. Every moment was valuable; even the bad ones. — Cassandra Clare

A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things: memories, shared experiences, hopes and fears. When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite. Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain: arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left un-said. They become like a splinter beneath the skin-unseen, but painful nevertheless. Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible. — David Dosa

What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it. — Gabor Mate

If your coping mechanism to date has been to ignore your weight, don't feel badly. You're in good company. I've done my share of standing on the doctor's scale backwards, cringing as the nurse scribbled on the clipboard, anxious when the doctor came in glancing over my record. I scrutinized his face for any semblance of judgment. Whether or not I faced the scale or the doctor skipped a pep talk, it didn't change the truth and it still pervaded every hour of my waking thoughts. I knew what I needed to do and just agonizingly prolonged it. What about you?

We want our lies to be true--desperately. We think it means less work, less pain. But aren't we experiencing work and pain every day when we are obese? We don't escape it, we just reallocate it, attach it to different problems.

The sooner we face the numbers and start to deal with them, the sooner we can resolve them. — Shannon Sorrels

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. — Jeanette Winterson