Ann-Marie MacDonald Quotes

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone.

Death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals.

For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been - Nothing!

I hate funerals. They aren't for the guy who's dead. They're for the guys who are left alive and enjoy mourning.

A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

I was a pallbearer. I felt, when I got the call that Peter had died, I didn't have any bank account, but I felt I needed to start walking then because there was no way in the world I would miss Peter Norman's service.

We cannot carry our father's corpse with us everywhere we go.

Funerals...are for the living.

The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.

Let mourning stop when one's grief is fully expressed.

Hired mourners at a funeral say and do - A little more than they whose grief is true

Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.

Ring out your bells! Let mourning show be spread! For Love is dead.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

Attachments and bereavements are inseparable.