Megan Devine

Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands.

If you’re going to feel this experience as part of love, we need to start talking about it in real terms, not as pathology, and not with some false hope of everything working out alright in the end.

There is no place this loss has not touched

What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times

There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe

Sometimes grief like yours cannot be held by the universe itself. True. Sometimes grief needs more than an endless galaxy. Maybe your pain could wrap around the axle of the universe several times.

. Of course you’re disoriented. Your mind is trying to make sense of a world that can no longer make sense.

Please try not to judge your current accomplishments based on what you used to be able to do. You are not that person right now.

I end this book with love because love is all we’ve got

We all need a little respite. You can’t keep staring at loss every single second; your physical organism simply can’t withstand it. The tricky thing is, especially in early grief, pain is everywhere. There is nothing that isn’t connected to loss. Taking a break from pain often backfires miserably.