Quotes about Loss

Godly despair cries out for perspective but allows the hollowness of loss to move the heart to seek God.

"King David was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: 'O my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you — O Absalom: my son, my son!'"

I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried: one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world, 'Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, where God, my Saviour, reigns.'

"I love you and I don't want to lose you. Because my life has been better since the day I found out."

I'm glad now, at age 66, that I never used alcohol or tobacco... I've buried a lot of friends who used tobacco or alcohol.

For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.

Whatever is singing is found, awaiting the return of whatever is lost.

In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.

And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.

But grief and griever alike endure.

He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

He knew that I was living in loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil's absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.