Tis not that dieing hurts us so- tis living- hurts us more.

Surviving is much more painful than death.

Tis not that Dying hurts us so — ‘Tis Living — hurts us more — — Emily Dickinson, from “’Tis not that Dying hurts us so — ,” [335], The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown & Co.,1960)

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading.

I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.

My dead go on suffering in me the pain of living.

Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living.

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or a open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you'd otherwise find beautiful - a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

"YOU FEAR TO DIE?
"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful — a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids — and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live