Rob Tourtelot
- On the other hand, no person we have loved is ever fully gone. When they die or vanish, they are physically no longer present, but their personhood permeates our synapses with memories and habits of mind, saturates an all-pervading atmosphere of feeling we don’t just carry with us all the time but live and breathe inside. Or the opposite happens, w... See more
from Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing by Maria Popova
- And I don’t think this situation resolves itself as you grow older. In fact, more people just die. Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.
from Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life by Amanda Petrusich
. 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."
from Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- When you look back at the most fruitful moments of your life years from now, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them unfolded amid a big loss or a crisis or in the face of a giant unknown.
from Tolerating Unknowns Will Make You Stronger by Heather Havrilesky
Indeed, when Kant's friend Funk died, he found himself forced to confront what is in some ways the ultimate example of the instant of change: the fact that all that we love will pass, including life itself. Even more poignantly, the very ineradicable nature of that constant, irresistible erosion of the present is what endows our life and the attach
... See morefrom The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
So we stumbled through our loving, difficult readings and tiny speeches; then the button was pushed, and as the coffin advanced solemnly into the furnace, dysfunctional squawks came like a shower of arrows out of the sound system. The tape kept trying to play and its clicks and grindings were amplified very efficiently into the overhead speakers. T
... See morefrom Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life by John Tarrant
What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple "I'm sorry," because in its banality it presumes nothing. Ndo, in Igbo, comforts more, a word that is "sorry" with a metaphysical heft, a word with borders wider than mere "sorry." Concrete and sincere memories from those who knew him comfort the mos
... See morefrom Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- But if we are lucky enough, if we are are stubborn enough, we love and we lose and then the loss opens us up to more love — different love, because each love is unrepeatable and irreplaceable — on the other side of grief; love unimaginable from the barren landmass of loss, love without which, once found, the world comes to feel unimaginable.
from Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All by Maria Popova
- Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.
from Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life by Amanda Petrusich