Quotes

My favorite widow book is called "Companion Through the Darkness." I highly recommend it to my widow friends. I've been rereading it recently for inspiration. Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

Grief:
The act of accepting forced change;
a constant state of my existence,
in varying degrees from white hot to disgruntlement;
a sign that I am truly alive.

Cognizance:
A momentary lapse into sanity,
where I realized that my insanity is a sane reaction
to an utterly insane event.

Inertia:
The place I find myself caught in;
not the past, not the present, and not yet the future.
Utter emptiness.

Hanging on:
Something I do,
but I don't know why.

Mourning:
The total insanity
that followed in the months after he died,
from which I have emerged different,
taller, stronger, more armored, more soft;
the process of sorting the seeds
into manageable, orderly piles.

Mystery:
The maze of thoughts
I have about where you went.

Happiness:
A state of being
that I don't believe
will ever come to me again.

Rage:
The state I use to survive
seemingly endless moments
of intolerable pain.

Gratitude:
The feeling I have now for even the smallest progress,
for my expectations are so low I am difficult to disappoint.

Envy:
When I forget that to trade places
with another is simply to trade problems;
the state I find myself in
when I think that my pain, my tragedy
is greater than anyone else's.

Child:
The life you left behind to keep me living.

Pity:
The rasp that opens my shameful wound;
the look on people's faces
where they haven't a clue what to say to me,
and when (I suspect) they want to believe
that it will never happen to them.

Transitional Lover:
A person who took me across the gulf
between your death and my life.

Epiphany:
The moment I realized
he was never coming home again.

Magic:
Something that still exists
if I listen
and follow the signs.
Something that breathes hope into me
when I least expect it.