Quotes & Sayings About When You Lose A Loved One

I loved you too much to lose you twice. — Laura Miller

Death is really a matter of perspective. So many people say "sorry for your loss" when a special one dies, but I don't see it as a loss. You don't lose the person at all, you gain a guardian angel that will stay with you and watch over you and their loved ones for life. — Tanya Masse

Do you even know what it feels like to lose someone you loved?" he asks.
"I lost everyone I loved," I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, "The day I met you. — Lauren DeStefano

What do you do when you lose a loved one too quickly? When you have no time to prepare before, suddenly, that soul is gone? — Mitch Albom

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you 'sir'. It just happens. — Robert McCammon

He stared right back at Blaylock and let everything he had in his heart show in his face.
He just let that shit fly.
Because there was a lesson in this Fade ceremony tonight: You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye - and he was willing to bet, when it happened, you weren't thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart. You thought of all the reasons that kept you together.
And, no doubt, how you wished you'd had more time. Even if you'd had centuries ...
When you were young, you thought time was a burden, something to be discharged as fast as possible so you could be grown-up. But it was such a bait-and-switch - when you were an adult, you came to realize that minutes and hours were the single most precious thing you had.
No one got forever. And it was a fucking crime to waste what you were given.
-Qhuinn — J.R. Ward

After that day when I saw the elephant, I let myself see more and believe more. It was a game I played with myself. When I told Alma the things I saw she would laugh and tell me she loved my imagination. For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love, both sides were heads: I knew I couldn't lose. — Nicole Krauss

The whole world is conscious. It's just that we become conscious at times, and you become conscious when you lose a parent, or just a loved one, period - a wife, a brother, you know. You wake up and say, "Man, it's real. I don't need this pimp gangster stuff anymore, I need something with a little more substance." And there is marketing for that. — KRS-One

If something inspires you, try and hold on to that inspiration because if you lose that inspiration, what do you have left? If music is your inspiration and it brings you together with friends, family or loved ones and that's the core of it, then always have it. Always draw from it. — Charlie Benante

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us. — Tom Perrotta

We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; merely in different rooms. — Paulo Coelho

I did another commercial. Don't lose your loved ones, I wrote, because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium 90 in your bones. Don't be a victim of fallout. When the tart on Thirty-sixth Street gives you the big eye does your body stride off in one direction and your imagination in another? Does your mind follow her up the stairs and taste her wares in revolting detail while your flesh goes off to Brooks Brothers or the foreign exchange desk of the Chase Manhattan Bank? Haven't you noticed the size of the ferns, the lushness of the grass, the bitterness of the string beans, and the brilliant makings on the new breeds of butterflies? You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twenty-five years and only Elixircol can save you. — John Cheever

In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you're inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space. In time, you will become aware of an opening you are going to have to step through. It might be the touch of a new lover, a new job, a move--but you'll know. You will step through. — Jamie Quatro

Well, I'm sorry you couldn't make it either. I'm sorry I had to sit there in that church--which, by the way, had a broken air conditioner--sweating, watching all those people march down the aisle to look in my mother's casket and whisper to themselves all this mess about how much she looked like herself, even though she didn't. I'm sorry you weren't there to hear the lame choir drag out, song after song. I'm sorry you weren't there to see my dad try his best to be upbeat, cracking bad jokes in his speech, choking on his words. I'm sorry you weren't there to watch me totally lose it and explode into tears. I'm sorry you weren't there for me, but it doesn't matter, because even if you were, you wouldn't be able to feel what I feel. Nobody can. Even the preacher said so. — Jason Reynolds

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death. — Meghan O'Rourke

You didn't just lose a loved one. You lost your heart, your memories, your laughter, your brain and it even took your bones. Eventually, it all came back, but different. Rearranged. — Louise Penny

You never know how the loss will come -- whether he will lose you or you him, but it is a certainty that there will be a shattering involuntary separation. Death is the abandonment caused not by betrayal but by fidelity. — Jeanne Safer

Amy Martin (ladysky) and Daniel Baciagalupo had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner's island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly
as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth
the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.
Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo's life when Joe wasn't loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum's left hand would lvie forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend — John Irving

What would you do if someone breaks your heart and just when you are set to lose yourself in that abyss of emotions and feelings that you no longer understand, when you are numbed by the pain and life seems to be whizzing past you in fast forward , at this time that person comes back to heal you, only to break your heart all over again. Would you let her touch you one more time, to heal you to break you for the third time? No? And what if that person is someone you'd loved more than life, if she had changed the way you lived , would you hold back if she stood in front of you with her arms outstretched? — Atul Randev

I believe that when a loved one has dementia, you experience many layers of grief.

The first wave of grief comes with the diagnosis. The realisation that the person who has supported you all your life, will no longer be able to do so, no matter how hard they try.

Grief the first time they struggle to remember your name or your relationship to each other.

Grief when you have to accept that you can no longer keep them at home.

Grief as they lose the ability to communicate, as another piece of the jigsaw is lost.

Grief every time they are afraid, agitated or confused. So much grief you don't think you can cope with anymore.

And then the overwhelming tidal wave of grief when they pass, when you would give anything to go back to the first wave of grief. — Emma Haslegrave

Has He from everlasting been going forth to save me, and will He lose me now? What! Has He carried me in his hand, as His precious jewel, and will He now let me slip from between His fingers? Did He choose me before the mountains were brought forth, or the channels of the deep were digged, and will he reject me now? Impossible! I am sure He would not have loved me so long if He had not been a changeless Lover. If He could grow weary of me, He would have been tired of me long before now. If He had not loved me with a love as deep as hell, and as strong as death, He would have turned from me long ago. Oh, joy above all joys, to know that I am His everlasting and inalienable inheritance, given to Him by his Father or ever the earth was! Everlasting love shall be the pillow for my head this night. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Sister, why do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Cage the animals at night?"
"Well ... " She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them."
"But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?"
"Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together. — Jennings Michael Burch

When you lose a loved one, you suffer. But if you know how to look deeply, you have a chance to realize that his or her nature is truly the nature of no birth, no death. There is manifestation and there is the cessation of manifestation in order to have another manifestation. You have to be very keen and very alert in order to recognize the new manifestations of just one person. — Thich Nhat Hanh

But I realize now that the art of living in the present is not so much controlling time, it's losing track of time. This is most likely to happen when we surrender to something we love to do: not because it's a demand, or an emergency, or an inability to do anything else. Seeking out what we love so much that we lose track of time when we're doing it - that goes beyond Einstein's theory and puts us into his life. He loved his work so much that he had to be careful while shaving; otherwise, he cut himself when a spontaneous idea struck. That is a hint of the timeless Now. — Gloria Steinem

Lord Beaverbrook was fundamentally a lonely man, with a low sense of his own self-worth, who was incapable of forming a stable, loving relationship with anyone. He could charm or he could bully; he could give or he could take; he was glad to see his guests arrive and pleased to see them go. Although many people genuinely loved him, he was incapable of believing that this was either possible or true. No wonder he was so restless, so impatient, so vindictive, so quick to lose his temper, so eager to stir things up. — David Cannadine

Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly both understandable and admirable, but it doesn't give you good reason to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other. If that person had died in different circumstances it would have been no less tragic. What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered or died, not that they died from a specific cause. By all means, the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one should be harnessed in order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives per se, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair on those we could have helped more. — William MacAskill

Certainly, we all wonder what is beyond, and when you lose a loved one, I think part of the grieving process includes where that person might have gone or if you'll ever see them again. I think it forces you to look up to the sky, to the cosmos. — Jenny Lewis

So, I guess people figure it's not as hard to lose your mother when you never got along anyway. But they're wrong. They're dead wrong. It's always hard to lose your mother. Always. If you loved her, if you hated her. If she smothered you, if she ignored you. It doesn't matter. She's your mother. Your mother. That's just a very tough bond to break. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again. — Melissa Bank

But then, I deserve to lose you. For years you took care of me like a mother takes care of her child. You sacrificed for me. You loved me when I was unlovable and helped me when I scorned you. Saying thank you a thousand times wouldn't be enough. Saying I'm sorry a million times might be a start. — Gena Showalter

I can't go back there. Back to a time when I had a weakness. When I lost control, and lost loved ones and territories in the process. The WUN still remains out of my hands. If I woke her now, what would I lose next? — Laura Thalassa

Why is that so hard? They will not love me, you say? When have they ever loved me? How can I lose something I have never owned? He — George R R Martin

Love is much like a dam: If you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force and current.
For when those walls come down, then love takes over, and it no longer matters what is possible or impossible; it doesn't even matter whether we can keep the loved one at our side. To love is to lose control. — Paulo Coelho

What we have deeply loved we can never lose, it remains in our heart for ever. — Debasish Mridha

You see when he forgot his Self his mother took care of his Self, and loved and praised his Self. Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous. — George MacDonald

When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job. — Tracy Kidder

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes;
That we must feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And, while we dream on this,
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? — Matthew Arnold

When you lose someone untimely; all left is never ending guilt, fear, and pain. — Nikita Dudani

Arthur,' continued I, relaxing my hold of his arm, 'you don't love me half as much as I do you; and yet, if you loved me far less than you do, I would not complain, provided you loved your Maker more. I should rejoice to see you at any time so deeply absorbed in your devotions that you had not a single thought to spare for me. But, indeed, I should lose nothing by the change, for the more you loved your God the more deep and pure and true would be your love to me. — Anne Bronte

I've lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is. — Patti Smith

Grace was my best friend. I can't let anyone forget her. I'm sure you understand."
Mr. Farrow smiled, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "Of course, it's easy to rewrite history when we lose a loved one, isn't it? Sometimes we only remember the things we want to remember. — Lisa Roecker

The difference between an ordinary life and an extraordinary life is only a matter of perspective. Pull the blinds. Look around you. It is a mad, mad world and you do not require ten digit bank accounts to immerse yourself in it. Travel down dusty roads without a destination in mind. Climb a mountain and scream out into the void. Kiss the hell out of a stranger. Skinny dip in a lake. Get lost and lose yourself (they are two separate things). Explore the wilderness (especially the one within). Think less of destiny and more of the moment right here. Because when you are old and ill with your loved ones around you, fame won't matter, nor will the extent of your wealth. You are the sum of the stories you can tell. — Beau Taplin

Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli-tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children's lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours wold be, too. — Katherine Center

How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live - you could see it go out of him - when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away. — Adam Johnson

When you lose a loved one, you come to these crossroads. You can take the path that leads you down the aisle of sadness, or you can say, 'I'm never going to let this person's memory die. I'm going to make sure everything they worked for continues.' — Bindi Irwin

No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled. — George Eliot

I hated him, loved him, wanted him, and yet I wished him away. So many conflicting emotions of wants and needs. So much fear. Not because of him, but because of myself - of how deep my feelings and desires were running, and how much I would fall if I happened to lose my grip. — J.C. Reed

Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns - whatever it is for you - live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person. — Tullian Tchividjian

He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. — Mohsin Hamid

I hate it, all of this," I screamed, my voice breaking. "I even hate him, even him." A huge sob came up from my chest.
And I did, right then. I hated you for everything; for making me feel so helpless everywhere I went, for making me lose control. I hated you for all the emotions in my head, for the confusion ... for the way I was suddenly doubting everything. I hated you for turning my life upside down and then smashing it into shards. I hated you for making me stand with a whirring fan in my hand, screaming at my mum.
But I hated you for something else, too. Right then, and at every moment since you'd left me, all I could think about was you. I wanted you in that apartment. I wanted your arms around me, your face close to mine. I wanted your smell. And I knew I couldn't-shouldn't-have it. That's what I hated most. The uncertainty of you. You'd kidnapped me, put my life in danger ... but I loved you, too. Or thought I did. None of it made sense. — Lucy Christopher

I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When — Cheryl Strayed

But...what makes you Nathan--what makes you so special--is that you are both White Witch and Black Witch, both dark and full of light. That's what I love about you. What I've always loved. And I love you still, Nathan, and I know I always will. But you're changing. And now...now what I fear is that you'll get the amulet and you'll hone the Gifts you took from your father. You'll be invulnerable and you'll kill more people, many, many more people. I fear you won't be able to stop and you'll lose yourself completely. And then I'll come to dread you too. — Sally Green

If you love somebody deeply and you lose that relationship - whether through death, rejection or separation - you will feel pain. That pain is called grief. Grief is a normal emotional reaction to any significant loss, whether a loved one, a job or a limb. There's no way to avoid or get rid of it - it's just there. And, once accepted, it will pass in its own time.
Unfortunately, many of us refuse to accept grief. We will do anything rather than feel it. We may bury ourselves in work, drink heavily, throw ourselves into a new relationship 'on the rebound' or numb ourselves with prescribed medications. But no matter how hard we try to push grief away, deep down inside it's still there. And eventually it will be back.
It's like holding a football underwater. As long as you keep holding it down, it stays beneath the surface. But eventually your arm gets tired and the moment you release your grip, the ball leaps straight up out of the water. — Russ Harris

You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye - and he was willing to bet, when it happened, you weren't thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart. You thought of all the reasons that kept you together.
And, no doubt, how you wished you'd had more time. Even if you'd had centuries ...
When you were young, you thought time was a burden, something to be discharged as fast as possible so you could be grown-up. But it was such a bait-n-switch - when you were an adult, you came to realize that minutes and hours were the single most precious thing you had.
No one got forever. And it was a fucking crime to waste what you were given. — J.R. Ward

I was 85 lbs. at my 2000 homecoming dance. But I wanted my collarbones and hip bones to show more. I'd feel my hip bones to make sure they were out. If not, I had more weight to lose. I lost my period until I was 17. I loved that. It meant I wasn't healthy, and I didn't want to be healthy. — Brittany Snow

We don't lose our loved ones when they die. We gain guardian angels. - Tanya Masse aka Comic Strip Mama — Tanya Masse

Below her, fall was just starting to work its magic on the foliage, creating a blaze of rust and amber stretching into the foothills and up the mountains. It was her favorite time of the year and normally she loved this view. Today, it only reminded her of how much she had to lose. — Kate Fargo

I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved. — Garrison Keillor

The thing was all mortals were going to lose the ones they loved. It was the way life worked. But for the most of the time, that reality was so far off in the mind that it had no more weight than a mere hypothetical. There were reminders, however, and the almost's, the near-misses, the oh-God-please-no's, snapped your chain and got you to stop and feel what was in your heart. — J.R. Ward

When I thought about having the greatest impact with my life, I thought about all the times people lose loved ones because diseases weren't detected early enough. I thought, 'I can play a role there.' — Elizabeth Holmes

Never take your loved ones for granted. You might lose them in a split of second and never got a chance to say good-bye. — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

We never lose our loved ones. The accompany us; they don't disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. — Paulo Coelho

I had to sit with my senses. This clear, beautiful intuition took over. I knew exactly how I felt, and I wasn't confused or clouded or compromised. I realized that none of my feelings had diminished, but I might have to lose someone I truly loved. I didn't want to run away from Claire, but I knew drug addiction was strong enough that I had to be willing, if need be, to let go of the person I'd just fallen in love with. — Anthony Kiedis

She had loved before, had been loved, had tasted what it was to dream, and had felt what it was to dance on air. She had also learned what it was to cruelly land back on the earth with a thud. Having to take care of her sister's child had sent her love away and there had been no one since. She had learned not to lose control of her feelings again. — Cecelia Ahern

Richard?" Her gentle fingers smoothed over his brow. Tears streamed down her cheeks. "I'm so sorry. Richard, I'm just so sorry." He reached for her. She came to him and fit perfectly into his arms. Richard clutched her to him, buried his face in her hair, and tried to still that horrifying fear that continued to reach out for him. He wouldn't lose her. If he had to move Heaven and Hell to keep her, he would. "Richard, I know you loved him." Richard couldn't bear to tell her that it was the thought of losing her that terrified him so. He continued to hold her, rocking her, trying to soothe himself with the motion and the feel of her in his arms. He wasn't sure how much time had passed before the fear receded. It left him cold and weary. — Lynn Kurland

LIFE never really ends ... It just changes. You never lose your loved ones,
you gain guardian angels. — Tanya Masse