Frances Hesselbein Quotes

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.

And yet I think of Christopher Reeve who said he would pay two million dollars to be able to feel pain again. What a courageous man! So I have to think that pain is a blessing.

I was paralyzed from the chest down when I was 19, so I kind of put my head together about dying, and I think I've come to terms with it.

I've met quadriplegics who have lost the use of their limbs but not their spirit. They are not dark, defeated people.

I got really, really sick with a horrible disease called transverse myelitis; I lost my legs. I couldn't play anymore. It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

It would be a lie to say that people are coming to adoption with joy at all times. Hope, perhaps, but it would be disingenuous to say that every part coming to an adoption isn't seriously grieving.

9/11, the wars and terrorism have affected all of us in different ways: people who lost family on 9/11, the people who lost family in the wars and people who lost family in various terrorist attacks that have occurred since.

The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.

My father died of brain cancer in 1991. I do not know anyone whose life has not been touched by the loss of a loved one to cancer. I wrote my book 'Gracefully Gone' about my father's fight and my struggle growing up with an ill parent. I wrote it to help others know they are not alone in this all-too-often insurmountable war against cancer.

My mother, she passed away when I was 28 years old. She fought cancer for more than 10 years. She had breast cancer, and I miss her.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience.

For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

I've had a bad time, which we won't dwell on. We were married and we worked together for 52 years, and suddenly with her gone I was a quadriplegic. Slowly I'm crawling back.

I suppose and I hope that the young guys who are out there losing their lives at least feel the same way I did. I shouldn't think about this very much because I'm almost weeping when I think about it.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

I don't want to lose my legs, you know. I don't want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. I don't want to be attached to a catheter. I saw all that stuff happen to my father, and as much as it upset me because I loved my father so much, it also really traumatized me.

I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. 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.

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.