Courtney A. Kemp Quotes

I was only a young girl of 13 when my father passed away from a sudden heart attack, leaving us unprepared to take on life without him. We had been protected from life's challenges so far. But without warning, all that changed overnight.

The reality is that my stepfather was like a father to me and watching him die from a sudden heart attack was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through.

I think losing your mother at such a young age does end up shaping your life massively. Of course it does, and now I find myself trying to be there and give advice to other people who are in similar positions.

I was 9 years old when my father - a strong, vibrant man in his early 40s - died of a heart attack. He was such a central figure in our lives that losing him was a terrible shock to all of us, my mother in particular.

My grandfather's death was really hard to deal with.

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

When my father died in my arms it had such a profound affect on me that at that very moment when my dad passed I realized that I needed to face my own fears.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

Then my mother was taken ill and died and my father took me to St. Mary's.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

When my wife passed, I stopped doing interviews and I stopped doing meet-and-greets, mostly because I sort of became this suicide ambassador. Everybody wanted to tell me their story.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

I have always been terrified of the death of my parents. I never knew if I could count on myself. I never knew if that would send me over the edge.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

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.

What shaped me the most would probably be when my dad passed away. For the rest of my life, I'll kind of feel like he's gonna come home.

My mom died when I was 8.

It's been difficult for me to get my head around Diana's death or talk about it. After she died, things were difficult, very difficult. We all have our own traumas and get on with it. But when it's there in your face year in, year out, it's hard.

When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

I lost my mother and my brother when I was 15 in two separate car accidents. I was doing well at school. I was a good sportsperson, but at that point, I gave up on all of those things that were there to be done. I couldn't deal with them.

When I was 14, my mother died. My father, who had always had ulcers, came apart. He had a series of intestinal operations, and was in the hospital for nearly a year. So the four of us teenagers lived by ourselves in the apartment without a guardian.

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.

You always hear about people going through miscarriages and you never understand what one is like unless you go through it.

Upon the death of my father, our family and myself were emotionally and financially exhausted.