On Grief
Grief is a weird thing. It can be a monster on your shoulder. It can be a friend sitting with you at the table. It can be a memory in a smell—the soft, delicate notes of floral perfume. Grief can find you in the middle of the night as you roll over to go back to sleep. It can even find you in your dreams.
Ashley Poston • The Seven Year Slip
The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.
Lori Gottlieb • Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
After the death of a loved one, the incoming messages seem scrambled for a while. At times, closeness with our deceased loved one feels incredibly visceral, as though they are present in the room, here and now. At other times, the string seems to have fallen off the board — not shorter or longer than it was before, but simply stolen from us... See more
Maria Popova • Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing
Jean thought of grief like a pet almost. A couple of times a day you had to take it out for a walk and let your thoughts wander and see if anything happened. Or sit quietly in the kitchen with some food to nibble and think about the person. Hold them close to you in your mind. In your heart. Stroke their hair. Blow on their soup for them. It’s what
... See moreSusie Boyt • Loved and Missed
My loss also includes a sense of bewilderment that I have never felt before after someone I love has died. It has been hard to understand how it is possible that my mother is nowhere. How can she be nowhere?
Siri Hustvedt • Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays
It doesn’t get easier the more you do it. Sometimes, it even gets harder. Way harder. Sending my love to you (and maybe asking for a little of it back) on this dark morning.
✏️: Notesfromyourtherapist (untaggable)
instagram.com“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”
“Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its
... See moreHere’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ‘Imagine,’ I said, back then, to some friends, in an earnest attempt to explain, ‘imagine
... See moreHelen Macdonald • H Is for Hawk
. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. "Find peace in your memories," I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have."