Grieving: 5 Quotes To Help You Through A Loss

Everyone goes through a grieving period at some point in their life. Going through one phase at a time can help you process the loss. However, this process can be so painful that we sometimes linger in such a phase longer than intended. The quotes about grief that we will cover below can help you go through the process and become a source of light during the grieving period.

Not only can these quotes help you through the grieving process, but  they will also allow you to think about everything you can learn from the process. This will make you aware of certain tendencies that you should avoid while grieving.

1. “There is no mourning like the mourning that does not speak.”

With these words, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow emphasizes the enormous weight we carry by not allowing ourselves to express our pain. We suffer an agony when we grieve, but some are conditioned to save appearances.

Holding back tears in public or holding ourselves back from expressing our emotions in any other way prevents us from accepting and processing the loss. As a result, we carry a lot of our pain on our shoulders and leave it in our lives for too long. The weight of not expressing our feelings can lead to deep depression.

It is important that you allow yourself to express your feelings. Suppressing them will only do more damage.

2. “Mourning is good. It’s the way we move through life.”

This quote from Rick Warren encourages us to view the process as an opportunity to say goodbye to the person in question. Sometimes it feels like you never got the chance to do that. Grieving can help you gradually let go of the person.

At the same time, Warren also invites us to see grief as a preparation for a new phase of life. At this stage, the person you have lost will not be there physically, but will still be in your heart.

The grieving process will allow you to say goodbye and transform the relationship you had with the person. Eventually you will realize that you can move on with your life.

3. “Mourning is a process, not a state”

At the beginning of this article, we wrote that grieving sometimes takes longer than intended. That is why Anne Grant finds that mourning is a process, not a state. It is a series of stages that you go through:  denial, anger, negotiation, depression and finally acceptance. But it doesn’t always happen in that exact order.

However, some people get stuck in one of these stages. Perhaps they deny what happened for too long or the grief continues for the rest of their lives. Anne Grant invites us to open our eyes and realize that grief is not a permanent state of life.

If you think that grieving is a state, it will hold you back from getting on with your life and becoming happy. It is important to be able to let go of the person. No matter how much it hurts, it will set you free.

4. “Mourning challenges us to love again.”

Terry Tempest Williams encourages us to view the grieving process as a challenge. Some are unable to confront the loss. They deprive themselves of the opportunity to love someone again because they are afraid of losing them. However, it is more than worth the risk.

Everything has its positive and negative sides. If you don’t know sadness, you can’t appreciate joy. Even though we have to go through loss several times in our lives, going through the different stages of grief helps us say goodbye and run the risk of loving again.

5. “Don’t protect yourself with a fence, protect yourself with your friends.”

This Czech expression is quite revealing: “Sometimes, when we experience a loss, we close ourselves off from others.” We don’t meet up with our friends, see our family and generally don’t have a social life. We no longer perform activities that we normally enjoyed.

It’s like building a fence around ourselves to protect ourselves from the pain we feel. However, by doing so we only make the pain worse. It is important to spend time with yourself and your pain, but it is also important to share it with others. They can then support you.

When you have hands available to help you, friends to hug you, and words to comfort you, you can endure the pain in a healthier way. When you isolate yourself from everyone else, the pain will devour you. In the long run you simply don’t know how to let it go.

Have you ever gone through a grieving period? How did you get through this? In any case, these quotes can help you become aware of what the process entails. Plus, they teach you how to get through it when you feel like you’re drowning in your own emotions. Something that looks like an ending doesn’t necessarily have to be an ending. There may well be new beginnings or new opportunities behind the obstacle, or simply other ways of relating to the person you have lost.