One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.
When I was younger, I used to pray that I would die before my mom. That's just how much my mom meant to me. I couldn't imagine being in this world without her. But then seeing cancer - seeing what it can do to somebody - as strong and as tough as she was, there was nothing she could do. Cancer is a dirty, dirty deal.
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
I lost two brothers in an airplane crash, both of them leaving a wife and kids. When I get to Heaven, that's probably the first question I'd like to ask: 'Why was it necessary?'
If you've lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn't - you will never understand.
You are the mystery incarnating itself, and it's beautiful when you remember. It's also painful and awesome and it contains unbearable beauty and unfathomable pain - the ocean of tears and galaxy of bliss. I don't say that lightly, but it's what we have.
My mother's death brought me to my knees. She was my hero, my role model, my very best friend. I spoke to her every single day of my life. I really tried hard when I grew up to make her proud of me.
Jesus feels my sorrow greater than I, for his love is infinite, and he suffers in an infinite way.
When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.
