Sudden Death Grief Quotes & Sayings

I was 'led' to read The Shack by Wm Paul Young after the sudden & unexpected death of my fiance', Marina DeAngelo in July of 2012. It helped me as it has millions of people with the trauma and grief associated with the great personal loss of a loved one."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] — R. Alan Woods

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes. — Joan Didion

You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.
He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.
It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.
I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.
And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love? — C.J. Flood

He tried to escape he could not
Cut the binding cord of human love [ ... ]
Sweet venom
His arrivals were swift
And his departures sudden
I couldn't understand how
He lifted the shower door
Right off its hinges [ ... ]
Love you he coughed and kissed me
See you next week he was out
The door like a thousand other times [ ... ]
Most reckless of
reckless angels — Edward Hirsch

Discipline
I am old and I have had
more than my share of good and bad.
I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden death
and been left alone and of love bereft.
I thought I would never love again
and I thought my life was grief and pain.
The edge between life and death was thin,
but then I discovered discipline.
I learned to smile when I felt sad,
I learned to take the good and the bad,
I learned to care a great deal more
for the world about me than before.
I began to forget the "Me" and "I"
and joined in life as it rolled by:
this may not mean sheer ecstasy
but is better by far than "I" and "Me. — Meryl Gordon

The world wept a silent, windless downpour, a befitting accompaniment to the arrival of death.
However, Lady Brenna Hilliard, only daughter of the late Earl Lundsford, had yet to join in the weeping. Shock and disbelief kept her from the comfort of tears. The torrent would come, she knew, in a wave of sudden grief, but for now her emotions were elusive, too numb to be felt. — Cynthia Wicklund

He'd been about to turn away when she lifted her face to the moon and sang.
It was not in any language that he knew. Not in the common tongue, or in Eyllwe, or in the languages of Fenharrow or Melisande, or anywhere else on the continent
This language was ancient, each word full of power and rage and agony.
She did not have a beautiful voice. And many of the words sounded like half sobs, the vowels stretched by the pangs of sorrow, the consonants hardened by anger. She beat her breast in time, so full of savage grace, so at odds with the black gown and veil she wore. The hair on the back of his neck stood as the lament poured from her mouth, unearthly and foreign, a song of grief so old that it predated the stone castle itself.
And the the song finished, its end as butal and sudden as Nehemia's death had been.
She stood there a few moments, silent and unmoving. — Sarah J. Maas

Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief. — Catherynne M Valente

We hold death, poverty, and grief for our principal enemies; but this death, which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not know that others call it the only secure harbor from the storm and tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of liberty, and the common and sudden remedy of all evils? — Michel De Montaigne

Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn't work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I'd wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home. — Helen Macdonald

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins. — Elizabeth McCracken

And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event, which would be so anti-climatic, so undramatic (a sudden violent seizure in his long abused heart, a quick massive flooding of the brain) it would go unnoticed. It was the small deaths occurring over an entire lifetime that took the greater toll. — Paule Marshall