Excerpt: An honest and raw collection of Michelle Zauner quotes from Crying in H Mart on grief and what it was like losing her mom and aunt to cancer.
“I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
“That kind of violence… it tears open a hole, it’s like a black hole. It sucks language and meaning and all sense and whenever we show up and try to make sense of it, it reins hallow because there’s no making sense of this kind of mass violence—mass suffering. And when people have just survived it, it’s like you’re sitting on the edge of that black hole and you’re about to be sucked in and the only way that you don’t fall in is if someone is holding your hand. That’s all it takes.”
Valarie Kaur
Excerpt: Stephen Grosz has been a psychoanalyst for 25+ years. These quotes from The Examined Life give you access to 50,000+ hours of his distilled insight.
“My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow. We want to believe we can reach closure because grief can surprise and disorder us—even years after our loss.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 209)
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.” ~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Excerpt: Each of us has immeasurable power and capacity to reinvent our lives. In the following story, notice how one grief-stricken women was able to recreate her life after the death of a loved one. I hope this finds you and your loved ones well.
