I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Gail CaldwellRead
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
Interpretation
Grief is an unpredictable and intense experience that defies simple definitions.
In this quote, Caldwell reflects on the profound and often chaotic nature of grief, emphasizing that it is not merely a straightforward path of sadness. Instead, it is a complex emotional journey filled with unexpected feelings and intense reactions that challenge our previous understandings of loss and mourning, revealing the depth of human emotion encountered in such experiences.
In practice
In a memorial speech, one might reference this quote to discuss the complex nature of grief.
I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest
Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
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