Hope

"It is true that the grief journey is very lonely, but it is also up to you to decide just how lonely you will make it."

"I believe I gather strength from the generations of women who came before me - that together we all hold the suffering of the world."

"We never truly "get over" a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it."

"I would still rather feel things and live life to the fullest rather than hide in a cave and attempt to protect myself from the uncertainties of the world."

"There is nothing like feeling truly "awake" and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, "There is still so much to be done, and I will continue to make the most of it."

"A feeling of pleasure or solace can be so hard to find when you are in the depths of your grief. Sometimes it's the little things that help get you through the day. You may think your comforts sound ridiculous to others, but there is nothing ridiculous about finding one little thing to help you feel good in the midst of pain and sorrow!"

"What is dying?I am standing on the seashore. A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object and I stand watching her Till at last she fades from the horizon,And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where?Gone from my sight, that is all;She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her,And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination. The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her;And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone”,There are others who are watching her coming,And other voices take up a glad shout,“There she comes” – and that is dying."

"This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance."

"Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible."

"I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future…"

"What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can’t penetrate.…people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality. What am I living on? Someone said the other day, “that old irrepressible-impossible- hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all…I can imagine now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent."

"You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well?"

"Sometimes words just arent enough. Sometimes it's easier to magically lose yourself in the memories long past, the ones you so selfishly took for granted. And sadly sometimes that's the only way to keep those people in your life- recapturing their glorious light before they fade. And inevitably their memory along with them."

"Having a dream, living that dream, losing that dream, dreaming again and then having that dream come true again is one of the greatest feelings ever because I`m stronger."

"You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."

"To the world, it doesn’t matter that much. Until you remember that it means the world to the patient. One exact world, bright and full of sounds, per person. That is what is lost."

"A lifetime, one might say, of loss, but we here recognize something much different, more nuanced, more full of shadows. A lifetime of hope. And anyone who's done both - hoped and lost - knows that in many ways, hoping is worse... As I grew into early adulthood and observed a larger pattern of hope and loss and hope and loss and hope and loss, and the concurrent resilience thereof, I came to a begrudging conclusion: neither of these things - hope and loss - can exist without the other, and yet at every turn it is necessary to believe that at some point one will ultimately conquer. And that will be our legacy."

"What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."

"I often wondered after David’s death: Had they known something then? Did their very souls recognize each other? Did Jacob, closer to God than anyone else I knew, somehow sense this was the last time he would see his grandpa? Hadthere been a message to the little boy in David’s long-held gaze? Did these two people—the six-year-old boy and the sixty-year-old man— realize something the rest of us didn’t?"

"In the midst of the darkness of loss, I found light. Admittedly, in those first weeks, it might have been but a single small spark I sensed deep inside of me, but that spark guided me in the twisted, dark journey of grief. As I stumbled over the roots of hopelessness and despair, that light grew to illuminate my path, a path I sometimes felt very alone on. At some point in the journey I’d turned around, and there was God. That is grace."