Sue Miller Quotes

No one can tell you what to expect or can offer a guide to grief. Because every relationship is so unique, no two people grieve the same way. And you have no idea how you are going to grieve till you are grieving.

But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

Grief is a terrible, painful place. You can't grind away on grief in a solid way and say, 'I'm going to work on this until it's over' because it will be with you for the rest of your life, whatever you do. So, you deal with it and move on.

Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

Life is precious, and when someone dies it's an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn't. It really crushed him.

Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.

When your mother dies, you're not a little girl any more.

There is a point in the grieving process when you can run away from memories or walk straight toward them.

I'm not great at dealing with death, I have to say. I find death very hard: my mum, my dad, Sid Vicious. I'm not a monster; I feel it and it scares me. One death at a time, please, is all my heart will bear.

My life was very tenuous last year. My daughter's death, in March in 2007, was unexpected. It was a shock. I didn't know if I'd survive it.

The death of my own son has made me more sensitive. It's made me more compassionate.

I think that what happens when you lose a parent, where you lose - you drop into a different kind of serious.

They say seven stages of grief. I think it's more like 77.

I was studying architecture at Berkeley when my father passed away in 2007. We knew he had cancer, but we didn't expect it to escalate so rapidly. In my mind, it was like, 'He'll pull through.' When he didn't, I didn't understand. I was 21, and my best friend had died.

The loss of my dad gave me a lot of inspiration because sometimes I stop and think, 'Would everybody have done the same thing that I did?' It was a very tough thing to cope with. I only went home for less than 24 hours.

I'm not desensitized to death.

It's difficult in your life when both parents pass so quickly and you're not really that old when they move on. There is a big gap in your life. There's a hole. You learn to live with it but never forget it.

My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.

Some people lose a whole world to grief sometimes, while others just don't grieve. Sometimes we're just too scared to face our emotions.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.