Ariel Levy Quotes

I learned that, with grief, you have to take it one day at a time and learn how to find the happiness amid the heartbreak.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

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.

I lost my husband, and it's a horrific thing to live through.

He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."

I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.

This is not what anyone wants to hear, just like somebody who wants to lose weight doesn't want to hear 'diet and exercise,' but I think giving yourself time and abstaining from interaction is the only way to get over somebody.

As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.

My dad passed away before my freshman year, and it altered how I thought. I was depressed - I didn't hang out with my friends. I worked through it by dancing.

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression.

For anyone going through a divorce or any other painful challenge, the first and most important recommendation I can make is to find some kind of spiritual and emotional support.

There's no road map. There's no textbook on how grief works and when your heart will be open - or if it ever will.

I could not bounce back from my divorce - emotionally - I just could not bounce back.

I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.

To lose your last remaining parent is the toughest thing. It is a very lonely thing.

Teenagers too often have to deal with loss and death. You had to cope with the untimely death of your brother; how can young people deal with such tragedies?

I am lucky in that I have never been depressed in my life, but this is the one thing which has really affected me: the loss of my mother as I knew her.

It's important to wallow and grieve when you have a health issue. I don't think you really get the best stuff out of life until you've had the worst stuff.

I've never lost a grown-up child, but I have known loss.

It was the saddest day of my life.

I'm very emotional. When I went through my first breakup, I thought it was the end of the world, and I thought I was going to die if I didn't have him in my life. It was good to cry it out and just scream, or call my friends in the middle of the night crying.

To lose two babies is really scary. It really caught on me emotionally, physically, everything. It took me at least 15 years to get over it and still, to this day, I miss my son.