I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Interpretation
Loss transforms us, shaping our character and making us more compassionate.
This quote speaks to the enduring impact of loss on individuals. It suggests that rather than completely recovering from significant losses, we integrate them into our lives, allowing these experiences to shape us into more empathetic and gentle versions of ourselves. The idea is that through the process of grieving and absorbing our losses, we evolve into beings marked by a deeper understanding and kindness.
In practice
Sharing the quote during a support group for those grieving.
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.
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.
Your life is your own, to develop or to destroy. You can blame others little and yourself almost totally if that life is not a productive, worthy, full, and abundant one.
Nothing shapes your life more than the commitments you choose to make.
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.
You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.
A home is a place in time. And no place stays the same after you finally grow up and leave it. No place can ever change as much as the person who grows up there.
When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.
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