Cheryl Strayed Quotes

It's hard to make progress with grief.

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.

Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.

Grief is a very scary thing, and there comes a point where it can really take you down.

Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.

As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on.

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu.

That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

You need to face the pain and the fear and walk through the Grief.

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

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.

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

The hardest obstacle I've ever had to overcome in my life is losing my mom four years ago. I wouldn't even say that I've overcome it, really. I don't imagine that I ever will.

There are some pains that run too deep for anything to absolve them. The best we can do is pick up the pieces and hope for the strength we need to keep going.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

When my stepfather died, I just kind of fell apart. I felt pretty vulnerable, like there literally could be no tomorrow.

It's easier to get over a lost body than a lost soul.

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

Time doesn’t, as advertised, heal all wounds. Although the wrenching immediacy of grief eventually passed, the settled sorrow that replaced it might in its own way be even more intense.

With Keith's [my fiance] murder, I was changed. I thought I would be a prosecutor forever, but there were so many days when I would leave the courtroom during a trial, and go down the hall to the ladies' room, and go into a little stall, and cry.

Her mother died at the age of 29, essentially turning her face to the wall and deciding to die. And so we can only imagine the agony she felt. And Eleanor Roosevelt really wanted to make her mother happier, and - and to make her live, you know, make her want to live. And there's something about, you know, when your mother dies, this sense of abandonment. I think Eleanor Roosevelt had a lifelong fear of abandonment and sense of abandonment after her parents' death.

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.