Basil of Caesarea Quotes

Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.

My assignment is to take my situation and to use it to help others who feel hopeless and/or helpless because of loss.

I think faith is incredibly important because you will become overwhelmed with what's happening and you will have waves of grief, but when you turn to your faith, I believe God will give you waves of grace to get through it.

When people are grieving, it's kind of like a storm, and you need something to grab onto, but often you have to brave it on your own.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

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.

We should not clap our hands and mourn, for he is out of trouble. You are still in 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.

My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

One of the things that I try to do when I have a tough time with anything - whatever it may be - is just look at someone else's situation. Here in Staten Island, look, I have people that have children that haven't been back in their home for 18 months after Sandy. They lost every worldly possession.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.

Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.

Time takes away the grief of men.

I just can't think how I would go on without children having lost Edith already... It's too upsetting for me to write about them. Naturally, I still hope, and wait, wait, wait.

My father passed away after three years of debilitating disease, which transformed a very strong and bright man into a real wreck. And that is hard. You have to get out of that stronger, if you can, which I was lucky to be able to. I was the eldest of the family, and I had to support my mother and help my brothers.

Over the years, people have often said to us that they were going through some horrible thing in their life - maybe the worst thing that had ever happened, or that they could think would ever happen - and that, somehow, in that state, we made them laugh. And I was like, 'That's a wonderful calling.'

Our own sorrows seem heavy enough, even when lifted by certain long-term joys. But watching others hurt is the breaker of most any heart.

It's never nice to lose someone close to you; unfortunately, life goes on, and we have to make peace with it and move on.

You rarely hear women crying in Grozney. They have cried their eyes out long ago.

I've seen so many women in my family, so many mothers, that have lost children in the war in such absurd ways. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep living? How do they keep smiling?

We're all, whether we like it or not, gonna have to deal with bereavement at some point in our lives, and it's something I think, as a society, maybe we shy away from.

For every story you hear that's tragic, there's another that's equally tragic or more so. I think you come to look at it as part of life.

I've just had some things to deal with, like family stuff, you know, lost my mom. Which is the most difficult stuff I've gone through. But it's just normal human stuff.