Quotes About Healing

People often think there is no way to heal from severe loss. I believe that is not true. You heal when you can remember those who have died with more love than pain, when you find a way to create meaning in your own life in a way that will honor theirs. It requires a decision and a desire to do this, but finding meaning is not extraordinary, it's ordinary. It happens all the time, all over the world.

I don't want to have to tell them that my life lost all its meaning when they died. They loved me, and they wouldn't want that.

Life gives us pain. Our job is to experience it when it gets handed to us. Avoidance of loss has a cost. Having our pain seen and seeing the pain in others is a wonderful medicine for both body and soul.

grief is optional in this lifetime. Yes, it's true. You don't have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined. As Erich Fromm says, "To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability

the reality is posttraumatic growth happens more than posttraumatic stress.

It may feel like all meaning left with the person you lost, but that is not true. You can continue to connect meaningfully with those who are still living, and you can form new connections, too. Those connections do not diminish your love for the person who died. They will only enhance it.

are attempts to regain some of the control I felt I lost when my mother died.

Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you're moving forward with your life.

Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.

There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.

Maybe that's it, [...] [w]ith what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces. [...] Maybe [...] what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking.

I don't want you to think I got through this undamaged, okay? But I'm learning to live with it. Because otherwise, the damage is all you are.

Maybe there is hope in the fragments, that what is lost can always be filled in by someone who knows.

I say good-bye to the part of myself that misses him so much.

Breathing is hard. When you cry so much, it makes you realize that breathing is hard.

hurt tends to drown out sorry.

When you break someone's heart, you also break yours.

it's gonna hurt because it matters.

I saw his scars - the visible ones-and saw how breaking him had not made him any less beautiful. If anything, he stood stronger, because he'd survived.

They beat the shit out of me. But you know what? I didn't need that shit inside of me. I'm glad it's gone.

This, I think, is how people survive: Even when horrible things have been done to us, we can still find gratitude in one another.

Then it hits me. Maybe we're the pieces, What? Maybe that's it. With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces. Maybe, what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking. Tikkun olam.

Whatever you had -- I don't know what it was, and that's fine. But it must not be easy for you. You miss him, and that's okay. But you have to figure that if it's too much hard to hang on, then maybe you should let go.

Without you I wouldn't have been able to contain the hate. I would have used it against myself. You're the one who helped me control it. My mind spun out to other things. But it always came back to you.