People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.
Interpretation
Losing a child fundamentally alters a parent's emotional landscape, creating an incomprehensible void that affects their very being.
This quote by Michael Robotham highlights the profound and unique grief experienced by parents who lose a child. It suggests that such a loss is so extreme that it challenges the natural order of life, making it difficult for parents to cope with the aftermath. The metaphor of a 'huge, black, bottomless hole' vividly conveys the deep despair and hopelessness that encompasses their experience, illustrating that losing a child is unlike any other loss.
In practice
You could use this quote at a memorial service for a parent who has lost a child.
One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.
So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.
You can tell someone you love them first. You can try to speak only the truth for a whole week. You can jump out of an airplane or spend Christmas Day all by your lonesome. You can help people who need help and fight real bad guys. You can dance fast or take an improv class or do one of those Ironman things… Adventure and danger can be good for your heart and soul.
I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
It's funny: I've always had the analogy of a snow globe, that Hollywood is a snow globe. No, it's true. If you shake it up, you can look at it and really enjoy it. But don't ever go in. Don't ever buy into it and be like, 'I deserve all of this!' because it can go away at any time, so just have a lot of fun.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.