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Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.
Sue Monk Kidd
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Grief can be a profound attachment that one struggles to let go of.

This quote reflects the deep emotional connection that individuals can develop with their grief, suggesting that grieving is not just a process of loss but also a complex relationship with the memories and feelings tied to the person who has passed. The speaker finds solace in embracing their grief, indicating that for them, to move on feels akin to abandoning the memory and love associated with the deceased.

Themes

GriefLossLoveMemoryAttachment

In practice

Example use cases

During a speech at a memorial service, one might say: 'As Sue Monk Kidd reminds us, sometimes we must embrace our grief, for it is a reflection of our love.'

More from Sue Monk Kidd

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
Sue Monk KiddRead
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
Sue Monk KiddRead
I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
Sue Monk KiddRead

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