Quotes & Sayings About Grieving A Mother

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

I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again. — Cheryl Strayed

We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone. — Iain Reid

In the old days, you cut out a scene that might've been a really great scene, and no one was ever going to see it ever again. Now, with DVD, you can obviously ... there's a lot of possibilities for scenes that are good scenes. — Peter Jackson

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

Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie? — Lorrie Moore

It is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it. — Khaled Hosseini

The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother's death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression: I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that's trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss. — Gregory David Roberts

You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York. — William Lyon Phelps

Time, That Is Pleased to Lengthen out the Day

Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day
For grieving lovers parted or denied,
And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away
From such as lie enchanted side by side,
Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe
Is he that in my childhood was the thief
Of all my mother's beauty, and in woe
My father bowed, and brought our house to grief.
Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost
Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line,
And so persuade me from you, he has lost;
Never shall he inherit what was mine.
When Time and all his tricks have done their worst,
Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

He understands evil better than any other person I've ever known. We disagree in how to eliminate it, but we do not disagree that it exists. — Nalini Singh

I like to eat alone in restaurants, with a book, particularly if I am out of town, alone, on business. It's relaxing. I feel not even a twinge of embarrassment. Is this gender-related? Is there a lingering feeling among women that if they are alone in public, they will be judged to be spinsters or spinsters-to-be? — Gene Weingarten

Omit needless words. — William Strunk Jr.

He took her like He took my mother. To torment me! To kill me and keep me alive to live dead! She did this, she let that bastard do this and your stupid loving GOD allowed it!!" ~Solomon Gorge~ — Lucian Bane

When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody's parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described. — Bhavya Kaushik

I didn't start grieving for my mother properly until I was maybe 16. — Peaches Geldof

You cannot be healthy and happy without discipline. If you want to measure the level of happiness in your life, just measure the level of discipline in your life. You will never have more happiness than you have discipline. — Matthew Kelly

I am the mother of three children whose birth mother died of cancer when they were young. When I met them, they were ages twelve, ten, and eight, all grieving in very different ways. I have seen first hand the pain and confusion that accompanies childhood loss. But I have also seen the healing that can take place when children begin to understand who Jesus is and how much He loves them. By using our family's personal experience as a foundation, I hope this book will be a refuge for grieving children to express their sorrow, to feel understood in all their pain, and to come to know that God is their ultimate source of comfort, healing, hope, and joy here on earth, as well as in heaven. — Kathleen Fucci

When I examined my own life, I realized that I had been standing at the foot of my mother's casket for 35 years, grieving her loss in so many ways in my daily life. I needed to reframe this challenging life event," admits Dr. Williams. "I reframed it to view my life as a train ride upon which my mother is with me. I hope I am taking her to places that surprise her and places she envisioned her children would go. Today she lives with me in a positive way. — Nathaniel J. Williams

When my late father died - now I'm in mourning for my late mother - that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, I will not let you go until you bless me. — Jonathan Sacks

And then I feel guilty, because I know all these offers are made in vain. I know I cannot get my mother back healthy for a day ... My mom is sick, sick and dying, and no bargaining will change that. And it's in all the books, bargaining, which makes me embarrassed. Look at me grieving my textbook grief. - 150 — Robin Romm

You can relate to somebody's pain and you have compassion, which can lead to intimacy. — Jeff Bridges

Good for you, Jason. It's perfectly natural to be angry with your mother for dying. Everybody who loses someone special goes through that. It's just part of the grieving process. — Han Nolan

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. — Anonymous

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. — Cormac McCarthy

Jesus, the Blessed Child of God, is merciful. Showing mercy is different from having pity. Pity connotes distance, even looking down upon. When a beggar asks for money and you give him something out of pity, you are not showing mercy. Mercy comes from a compassionate heart; it comes from a desire to be an equal. Jesus didn't want to look down on us. He wanted to become one of us and feel deeply with us.
When Jesus called the only son of the widow of Nain to life, he did so because he felt the deep sorrow of the grieving mother in his own heart (see Luke 7:11-17). Let us look at Jesus when we want to know how to show mercy to our brothers and sisters. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Not until she'd left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn't ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark. — Anne Tyler

Death is nothing else but going home to God, the bond of love will be unbroken for all eternity. — Mother Teresa

I do not diminish his love for me,' Imogen said. 'I would never do that. I know precisely how much he loved me: as much as he was capable of loving any woman, probably. He loved me somewhat ... after his stables, perhaps more than his mother.'
'Oh, Imogen,' Annabel said. 'Why dwell on such a-'
'Grief is like that!' Imogen snapped. 'You can only fool yourself so far. — Eloisa James

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. — Cheryl Strayed

A grieving son was given the opportunity to write parting words on a card at his mother's funeral. He quoted the verse, And morning came and Jesus was standing on the shore. — Megan McKenna

I'm in my usual state up here in the commentary box: high tension, heart beating like a trip hammer, whatever that is. — Murray Walker

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail. — Donna Tartt

I was scared before every battle. That old instinct of self-preservation is a pretty basic thing, but while the action was going on some part of my mind shut off and my training and discipline took over. I did what I had to do. — Audie Murphy

I don't believe in regretting - one should try to move on. My mum was good at that. She was deeply in love with my father, and he died when I was nine. She remarried, and her second husband died, too. I saw the grieving process she went through. My mother had this way of moving on. It was a fine trait. — Robert Winston

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother - even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death. — Cheryl Strayed