“...the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve."Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257”

“She was grieving the loss of her youth, the closing down of possibilities as life became what it was rather than what it might have been.”

“No heartbreak has grieved me as much to discover, the calorie content of my peanut butter.”

“Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don't grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot's wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt.”

“I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life. ”

“I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity...On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.”