David Kessler Quotes

The time will come when memory will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes." That's how it goes: pain first, meaning later.

watch our loved ones go peacefully into the sunset. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to make the last chapter of life meaningful.

talk to other parents who are broken and bitter and feel robbed at the loss of a child. They want to know why I wasn't destroyed by Jim's death. I tell them that his life had meaning even though it was so short, and perhaps he wasn't meant to be here any longer. Being with him when he died was a gift, and I've learned to trust in God, his sovereignty, and his faithfulness. I

When you hear someone repeating his grief story over and over, that means his grief has not been witnessed in a healthy way.

Repeating the story is often a griever's subconscious way of trying to get much-needed attention.

We must move slowly into the unknown of life after death.

It helps to say, "I'm unhappy today," and leave it at that.

After all my years working with the dying and the grieving, I have found that in this lifetime, the ultimate meaning we find is in everyone we have loved.

No matter how long you were together, it's not enough time, but the love you shared is not gone. It lives within you, as a part of you. The experience of love that you had can never be destroyed or changed by a new love. That love will exist forever in its own time, in its own way, in your heart. But more love can be available to you if you desire. Your heart can have many loves in its lifetime. A new love can grow out of the same soil without diminishing a past love. You still have a life. It was one you didn't prepare for and you didn't want. But this road is still worth traveling. Your story is still in the making, waiting for you to find it.

We can't tell a person who is mentally ill or addicted to use his brain to help himself recover, because his brain is the diseased organ. Because such people cannot do what is necessary to help themselves, professional help is necessary but often hard to find, or expensive, or not very good, or some combination of all of the above.

What other people think of your grief is none of your business.

We are a grief-illiterate society.

Living is different from being alive. We come out of loss alive, but we're not living yet.

Maybe your meaning will come by finding rituals that commemorate your loved one's life, or by offering some kind of contribution that will honor that person. Or the loss of your loved one may cause you to deepen your connection to those who are still with you, or to invite back into your life people from whom you've been estranged. Or it may give you a heightened sense of the beauty of the life we are all so privileged to have as long as we remain on this earth.

We must move slowly into the unknown of life after death. Underneath the reluctance to live or love again is fear.