Every second of every day I still love them, and I won’t believe they are dead until I see it for myself.

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper. She lived.

They say that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space—atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.

What is this sleep which holds you now?
You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me.

They say that a part of you dies when a special Loved One passes away…I disagree…I say a part of you lives with your Loved One on the other side.

I know for certain that we never lose the people we love, even to death. They continue to participate in every act, thought and decision we make. Their love leaves an indelible imprint in our memories. We find comfort in knowing that our lives have been enriched by having shared their love.

Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.

I know she isn’t coming back, but I still think that she will. Nothing can make that go away. We figure out what death means when we’re born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a dream.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.

You don’t know how easy death is. It’s—it’s like a door. A person simply walks through it, and she’s lost to you forever.

Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.

Everyone keeps telling me that time heals all wounds, but no one can tell me what I’m supposed to do right now. Right now I can’t sleep. It’s right now that I can’t eat. Right now I still hear his voice and sense his presence even though I know he’s not here. Right now all I seem to do is cry. I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don’t know what to do with all this hurt right now.

Say not in grief he is no more, but live in thankfulness that he was.

Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death.