My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. ... I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature.—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
This might sound sadistic but it’s true; people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes them feel connected to something and connection is the best salve for sadness. The irony is we’re usually at our most disconnected when we’re grieving, either because we’ve lost the person we felt closest to or because we’ve withdrawn from others in order to protect ourselves from future pain, or to protect them from our “brokenness.”—Hazel Hayes, Out of Love. Highlighted
A breakup is like a death without a funeral.—Hazel Hayes, Out of Love. Highlighted
If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.—Sally Rooney, Normal People. Highlighted
It’s even more difficult to talk about you in the past tense because you’re technically still here. Here as in alive, obviously, not here in this house.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And this, I’ve just now decided, is maybe harder than death. With death there’s no option to call someone, to hear them laugh, to see or touch or hold them again. There’s no decision to be made. No temptation to resist. Choosing to be apart is its own special kind of torture. It means making that choice over and over again. Every moment of every day. And some days the choice doesn’t seem as clear.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
I’m beginning to realise that time does not heal wounds. Time just adds more days in which to feel the effect of them.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And look, I know how this goes. I know that by the time you get married I’ll have healed enough that I can smile for you too. But this foresight barely makes a dent in the agony of imagining it now. Somehow, each fresh loss feels different, like a maze with shifting walls; I know there’s a way out, but I’m fucked if I can find it.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
New Year’s Eve finds me staring at an endless loop of liminal spaces: unfinished construction sites, dreamlike swimming pools with no obvious entrance or exit, mono-yellow hallways in some nondescript hotel. I’m reluctant to call it an addiction, but I can no longer go a day without watching these videos, which get me so close to that feeling of falling, and the sense that at any moment the ground will hit and everything will suddenly make sense.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
But quick as memories come, they are rewritten, altered by the knowledge that you knew then how little time we had. And soon this knowing starts to seep through my whole mind, like ink in water, tainting every memory I have of you, darkening the tone of my whole childhood. I thought that I had mourned you fully. That there would be no more mourning left to do. But this is a fresh, graveside grief, raw and untamed, that doesn’t so much slip under the door as burst through it, demanding my attention.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted