What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

- Gail Caldwell

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

- Gail Caldwell

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.

- Gail Caldwell

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

- Gail Caldwell

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. W…

- Gail Caldwell

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.

- Gail Caldwell

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 dialogu…

- Gail Caldwell

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

- Gail Caldwell

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world …

- Gail Caldwell