Losing A Child Quotes

“There's nothing that symbolizes loss or grief more than a mother losing a child.”

“It is something you can't predict, and it is the huge sadness in your life, losing a child.”

“When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.”

“Life, Rose well knew, could throw some hard punches at you, but nothing hurt as much as losing a child, or seeing one of your children hurt and suffering. Becoming a parent changed you forever, as nothing else could. Not good or bad fortune. Not friendships. Not even a man or a woman.”

“Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.”

“By the time we hit our forties, we've all known pain--it's been layered on us like so many coats of paint. Who's to say which heartbreak is the greatest: Losing a child or never having a romantic relationship? Surviving cancer or having a mentally ill son? All painful life events gouge deep furrows and cause emotions to bleed out of us--shock, sorrow, and dismay. Through these tragedies, we are constantly rediscovering ourselves, peeling off the personas we've created to fit in socially and reaching for the unaltered seed of self within us. We'll never completely know our raw core--never completely be able to separate the white of external influences from the yolk of our true selves. But we can ask the questions, keep on with the quest.”

“Abortion does not just hurt women. Abortion hurts a family, and it has a domino effect of hurting those related and close to those families through the grief and reality of losing a child to abortion.”

“Losing a child is probably the singular most horrible thing.”

“The most difficult thing anyone can face is losing a child. You have to focus on God. There's no other way around it.”

“As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.”

“In some aspects losing a child is like a wall, but instead of getting over it, you must carry the wall with you, wherever you go, for as long as you live.The wall is immovable.You can’t go anywhere until you learn to move the wall.You are just stuck in the same place, forever.You can tug and tug all you want, there are days that the wall will not move.And there are days that it moves ever so slightly.Over time I have realized that in order to move forward, knowing that I must bring this wall with me, that the best way to do so is to metaphorically flood the soil near the wall with water, and have the wall float with me, instead of me having to carry it.Every act of love and kindness turns to water.Water and love can penetrate and move anything.It just takes time. I need to turn my wall into a raft.”

“Losing a child is totally overwhelming: you have no idea how you are going to carry on, how you will look after your other children, and how you will keep your marriage together. But, however desperate you are feeling, there are always ways in which you can get help, and ways you can find to get through it.”

“There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.”

“Life is a cosmic grab-bag. At this moment, somewhere in the world, someone is losing a child, skiing down a mountain, having an orgasm, getting a haircut, lying on a bed of pain, singing on a stage, drowning, getting married, starving in a gutter. In the end, aren't we all that same person? An aeon is a thousand million years, and an aeon ago every atom in our bodies was a part of a star. Pay attention to me, God. We are all a part of your universe, and if we die, part of your universe dies with us.”

“I don't think you could get anything worse than losing a child. I think if my child died, I would prefer it if I were dead.”

“I think the important thing is you're able to function as a parent to your other children, if you're lucky enough to have more children, and you're able to cope with the world and work. When you're in the trauma of losing a child, you can't imagine that that will ever be the case.”

“To be perfectly frank, there is an odd place after losing a child, where you think somehow your life is worth less.”