Jesus sufferes to sympathize with our sufferings.

When you're grieving that's not the time to be brave or strong, you need to let it show

Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

I honor my grief. I try to be kinder to myself. I give myself time to move through and to process whatever is making me sad.

I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.' It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

Becky cried, and Tom tried to think of some way of comforting her, but all his encouragements were grown threadbare with use, and sounded like sarcasms.

When I talk to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient support groups, I take questions at the end. At one talk I was asked, "What's the difference between yourself and someone without mental illness?" At another talk I was asked, "How do you make the voices be not so mean?" I wish I knew.

God] seeks us in dark places and suffers with us in our tragic prodigality.

Death folds the corners of my mouth into a heart-shaped star. It sits on my tongue like a stone around which your name blossoms distorted. — Audre Lorde, from "Speechless," The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde . (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition February 17, 2000)

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it—they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden—yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it.

The word comfort is from two Latin words meaning "with" and "strong" — He is with us to make us strong. Comfort is not soft, weakening commiseration; it is true, strengthening love.