I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Interpretation
Loss transforms us, shaping our character and making us more compassionate.
This quote speaks to the enduring impact of loss on individuals. It suggests that rather than completely recovering from significant losses, we integrate them into our lives, allowing these experiences to shape us into more empathetic and gentle versions of ourselves. The idea is that through the process of grieving and absorbing our losses, we evolve into beings marked by a deeper understanding and kindness.
In practice
Sharing the quote during a support group for those grieving.
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.
Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.
Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be.
We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.
But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.