Sheryl Sandberg Quotes

You can't go to Amazon and order a book on how you handle grief. There's books on it, sure. But there's no tried and true manual. You just have to live that out. There's no formula to heal.

We’re built to move on. Someone dies, no matter how close you are to them, you move on. That helps in a lot of ways.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget. [...] So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

I never know what to tell them. I mean, there's nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I'd say that for 3 months, you're going to feel worse than you've ever felt and you cope as best you can. And that after 6 months, the pain isn't so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

Grief dares us to love once more.

Humor is imperative, more important than food. You have a choice when someone dies. You can lie down or get back into life. Do something for someone else.

Laughter, and the broader category of humor, are key elements in helping us go on with our life after a loss.

My parents and my sister died... very close together, and after that, I lost quite a bit of my sense of humor. Most of it I think has kind of come back, but I know there was a time when I didn't think things were funny anymore. I kind of think they're funny again.

If you live through the death of your child, you should be able to talk about it and let other people know it's OK to go on.

It took about five years until we were properly over Freddie's passing. You learn to live with it.

First of all, a lot of people, a lot of women and men, have lost their children. I'm not the only one. But I happen to be blessed that my son gave me all these things to work with so that I get to work out my grief in a way that other people are not able to. So I can't possibly be downtrodden about that.

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.

I'm trying..." How could I put it? "I'm trying to get far enough down the line so that I can remember." I stopped, then continued: "so that I can remember without the pain killing me" And the days were stacking up. And weeks. And months. It was now almost the middle of June and he'd died in February, but I still felt like I'd just woken from a horrible dream, that I was suspended in that stunned, paralyzed state between sleep and reality where I was grasping for, but couldn't get a handle on normality.

Bones heal, but the loss of my friend will never heal.

There's a lot that I haven't put up there since my husband passed away because then it would be grief everyday. I have to fight within myself at times and ask, 'how do I go through the grief and find a light, even a glimmer of it?'

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.

When someone you know passes on, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.

Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.

I have experienced loss in my life, but the thing that brings you back is your faith.