I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.