To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in suffering.

You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved.

Those who have lost an infant are never, in any way, without an infant.

Time is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.

Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.

There are griefs which grow with years.

After a while, the telephone rang. Like a snakebite the thought darted into me, I shall never be rung up by her again. Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

To everyone else, the death of that being you love for his own sake, for her own sake, is an event that occurs on a certain day. For you, the death only begins that day. It is not an event: it is only the first moment in a process that lives in you, springing up into the present, engulfing you years, decades, later, as though it were the first moment again.

To mourn is to be extraordinarily vulnerable. It is to be at the mercy of inside feelings and outside events in a way most of us have not been since early childhood.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.