Quotes & Sayings About Grieving Over Death

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night. — Donna Lynn Hope

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

The Secret Revelation of John opens, again, in crisis. The disciple John, grieving Jesus' death, is walking toward the temple when he meets a Pharisee who mocks him for having been deceived by a false messiah. These taunts echoed John's own fear and doubt. — Elaine Pagels

To each of the mourners outside in the lane, I would be no more than a pale face glimpsed for a moment behind the glass. I wished I could smile at each of them, but I knew I must not, since a grinning mug would spoil their memories of this sad occasion.
We were all of us mourners overtaken by the moment: It was not ours to shape. We must give ourselves over to being the Grieving Family, upon whom others must be permitted to shower sympathy.
All of this I knew without ever having been told. It had somehow been born in my blood. — Alan Bradley

It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain. — Barbara Taylor Bradford

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

Talking about your feeling with someone who is willing to listen can be enormously consoling, especially if that person has experienced a death similar to the one you are grieving. — Candy Lightner

It made a romantic tale. The young rouge, cheating death, returning to his grieving lover. But in reality? Ashyn had always known life did not resemble one of her book stories or Moria's bard tales, and yet there was a part of her that hoped it did. The more she saw, the more she realized she was wrong. People made up stories because that is what they wanted from their world. A place where goodness, kindness, and honor were rewarded. They were not rewarded. The people of Edgewood could attest to that. - Sea Of Shadows — Kelly Armstrong

Oh, the different consciousness between the grieving and the dying! One sees midnight, the other joyful sunrise. One sees death, the other Life as never before. — Richard Bach

Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me." — George W. Bush

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back
to be sucked back
into it? — C.S. Lewis

There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence. — Brian M. Holmes

And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a whole life to me, as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is to them their world, and that in that life of mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's what is so grievous. — Thomas Hardy

The train blows through town
delivering reality,
slapping my face and screaming,
"You are alone"
Rose colored memories drown,
taking their last breath. — Kellie Elmore

I thought then that we would all die in the darkness and solitude. I thought that an executioner would come for us silently one night. I thought I might wake briefly with the weight of a pillow on my face. I thought that I would never see sunshine again. I was a young woman then, and I thought that sorrow as deep as mine could only lead to death. I was grieving for my father and frightened by the absence of my brothers, and I thought that soon I would die too. I — Philippa Gregory

Time heals nothing. It only brings other issues and tissues, and takes what is incurable or unacceptable out of the center of our attention. — Ana Claudia Antunes

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you. — Kellie Elmore

To make sure I learned the etiquette of grieving, Granny took me with her to the many funerals she attended. O Death, where is thy sting? Search me. I grew up looking at so many corpses that I still feel a faint touch of surprise whenever I see people move. — Florence King

Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral. — Damien Echols

The denial of death is openly acknowledged as a significant trait of our culture. The tears of the bereaved have become comparable to the excretions of the diseased — Philippe Aries

After a major change in your life, either you get stuck in painful emotions or you take charge of your life and process your feelings to become emotionally stronger and resilient, the choice is yours. — Linda Alfiori

Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve quilts stored in the great zinc trunks of Prem Nivas, the moulting feather of some pond-heron, a small unrung brass bell, the memory of decency in an indecent time, the temperament of Bhaskar's great-grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minsisster of Revenue's impatience with her, she was his regret.
And it was right that she should continue to be so, for he should have treated her better while she lived, the poor, ignorant, grieving fool. — Vikram Seth

Don't spend too much time grieving for me, Elena. I know you're probably a little sad as you're reading this, since that means I'm dead and you're having to learn how to go on in a new way. I would be sad if you didn't miss me, so I won't tell you not to, but I will tell you to keep on living. The world is full of beautiful music, flowers, places, and experiences. Enjoy it all as much as you can. Just remember it's the people in your life that make it worthwhile...People and memories, not things are what's important in the end. Nothing else matters as much as that. — M. Reed McCall

Grief is the natural by-product of love. One cannot selflessly love another person and not grieve at his suffering or eventual death. The only way to avoid the grief would be to not experience the love; and it is love that gives life its richness and meaning. — Lance B. Wickman

#8 - Feeling Peaceful - It is helpful to be at peace with your loved one's returning Home to God, in order to be better able to receive a comforting communication. Feeling peaceful is an emotion that is very hard to experience when you are, understandably, very upset as you go through the grieving process. But being emotionally overwrought can give out negative energy, thus, making it harder for your loved one to get through to you, or for you to even notice a sign from them. However, all things are possible with God, and He may bless you with an after-death communication, no matter what the circumstances, because He wants to comfort you and bring you peace. Pray for peace for your anguished heart. Pray for acceptance and comfort, so that you can go on with your life contented in knowing that you will be fully reunited once again. — Christine Duminiak

At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson's sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife's bedside.13 He was, his daughter recalled, "in a state of insensibility" when Mrs. Carr "with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted" - and not for a brief moment. Jefferson "remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive." When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty's death. According to his daughter Patsy, "The scene that followed I did not witness" - presumably "the scene" unfolded in the library when he revived - "but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself."14 (Patsy was writing half a century later.) A — Jon Meacham

If you are working with a therapist counselor social worker grief expert minister priest or anyone else who is trying to help you navigate the wilderness of grief and they start talking about the groundbreaking observations of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross suggesting there is an orderly predictable unfolding of grief please please please. Do yourself a favor. Leave. People who are dying often experience five stages of grief: denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance. They are grieving their impending death. This is what Elizabeth Kubler Ross observed. People who are learning to live with the death of a beloved have a different process. It isn't the same. It isn't orderly. It isn't predictable. Grief is wild and messy and unpredictable — Tom Zuba

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy. — Jandy Nelson

Manners matter as this author memorably illustrates. Eleanor Roosevelt stubbornly kept her clout behind Adlai Stevenson was an almost visceral resistance to John F. Kennedy's charms as a newcomer to power. The sudden death of Eleanor's granddaughter shortly before JFK was to meet with her suggested that rapprochement was impossible. Kennedy's genuine gentle manners toward the grieving former first lady won her over and may have shifted the balance in an extremely close election. — David Pietrusza

Eleonora Duse said, "Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick," and made me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her their photos, which she kissed and cried over. She never said 'Cease to grieve', but she grieved with me, and, for the first time since their death, I felt I was not alone. — Isadora Duncan

But we are not going to talk about that right now, because to talk about it I'll have to think about it, and I've thought it to death over the last year. There are parts of my brain that are still tirelessly thinking about it, about her, an entire research and development department wholly dedicated to finding new ways to grieve and mourn and feel sorry for myself. And let me tell you, they're good at what they do down there. So I'll leave them to it. — Jonathan Tropper

Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial or so long. It must have been a frightening realization: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories that would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.

That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met. — Katarina Bivald

Death doesn't happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you're okay. But my life was over. — Caroline Flohr

From my distance the loss was theoretical, and though I couldn't have said so, I preferred it that way. I felt relieved to be so far away, because I was excused from grieving. I felt nothing but tenderness for her, but there was an emotional emancipation to being here and not there. Even though I didn't believe in God or heaven, I could childishly go on believing that she was still around. When it happened, the specific timing of my grandmother's death seemed like a footnote: She died just after I went away. But a lesson would persist as I formed and unformed long-distance relationships over the years. Going away could free you from feeling too much. — Elisabeth Eaves

That was the problem with grieving one child in a family with other children. In my despair over losing Riley, I'd lost my daughter too. — Leslie A. Gordon

Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.
And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him
a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.
And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you. — Philip K. Dick

Another Weeping Woman
Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.
Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death. — Wallace Stevens

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

Usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it's about them. Either they want to feel like they can say something helpful, or they simply cannot allow themselves to entertain the finality and pain of death, so instead they turn it into a Precious Moments greeting card. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

When you pray to God resignedly, as though patiently accepting the punishment of grief at the death of a loved one, and you say: "Thy will be done O Lord. The Lord giveth, and he taketh away", you have not yet known the God of love, for God giveth only. God never takes that which has not been given. What God gives to you you regive to Him for His regiving.
You rejoice when God gives birth to life, yet you deeply grieve when you give rebirth to new life - for that is what death is. — Walter Russell

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.
It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent
holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting. — Joseph Hansen

When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient. — Stieg Larsson

You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I'm scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I'm going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets, and my biggest concern, if I have any, will be my wife back here grieving. When I die, I will be identified with Christ's exaltation. But right now, I'm identified with His affliction. — R.C. Sproul

I think death is a tremendous adventure- a gateway into a new life, in which you have further powers, deeper joys, and wonderful horizons. — Leslie Weatherhead

Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of nowhere carrying casseroles, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over, death muffled their voices. — Joan Abelove

It is so much easier to grieve for the dead than to care for the living. At least in death we are all perfect. — Jon Richardson

For the rest of the morning they worked quietly ad steadily, realizing that their contentment here at Uncle Monty's house did not erase their parents' death, not at all, but at least it made them feel better after feeling so sad, for so long. — Lemony Snicket

The intense roller coaster of emotions will gradually lesson over time. But there is no timeframe for the grieving process, and it will not be rushed, no matter how fast you'd like to "get over it." The reality is that there is no getting over it; you can only walk through it. — Elizabeth Berrien

I had met death before, in different forms
I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away. — Susanna Kearsley

Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

What happens when you return
and find nothing
but a hollowed shell,
shingles and floor,
walls and echoes
and the light that lead you here
has now burned out
and the ones who built it
have traveled afar
and you cant go to them,
no matter what shoes you wear. — Kellie Elmore

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror. — Nancy Horan

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

None of them would be the same now that he was gone. But that pastor was right. His life was worth celebrating. And in that instant, she made a decision. She would cry when tears came, and she would mourn. But she would not rest there, not stay there. He would not have wanted her to live in a dark place, grieving the days his death had taken from her. He would've wanted her to smile at his memory. Celebrating every single day they had been given.
...
She had lost much, so much. But with him, she could never look at his loss without also looking at h incredible gift she'd been given, the gift of knowing him, of loving him. (No matter how short the time.) — Karen Kingsbury

It's unnatural to believe death usually has a beauty and a concordance and is usually a coming together of your life's work. It leads to frustration for the patient. And it leaves grieving families convinced they did something wrong. — Sherwin B. Nuland

Yes, you are still grieving for the fact that Olly is not loving you as you love him. But death is no solution. Certainly not this horrible, messy death. Could you at least not consider possible option that is not leaving you looking diabolical at funeral?"
Oh, for the love of God. — Lucy Holliday

You don't know what is going to come to you in this world; you have to go on living and worrying. Those who die are pitying us; they are blessing us. Why should you grieve for them? — Paramahansa Yogananda

When you miss someone, they leave a person-shaped hole behind in the world that nothing can ever fill. If you don't keep thinking about them, the edges of the hole shrink and fade. You can't let go or the last of them disappears. — Martha Brockenbrough

Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse.

You'll feel guilty that you're still breathing.
But you can't stop.
You'll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again.
And it will be awful the first time that you do.
You'll feel guilty for just about everything at first.
And someday, at some point, you'll start to feel guilty . . .
for forgetting to feel guilty.

But of all Heaven's lessons, guilt isn't one of them. You don't need to hold on to it. It doesn't need to be a practice and it shouldn't be your life.

Heaven would never approve of your guilt.
Because Heaven has no regrets. — Tessa Shaffer