When a loved one dies, you may feel as though something within you has died, too. You feel that deep void that nothing could ever fill.
Your whole world changes. All of a sudden, you wonder about the meaning of your life.
Sometimes, you can’t even put everything into words. You just feel lost and confused. You feel as though time has stopped and your life has stopped as well.
What do you do now that your loved one has gone away? How do you even start to do the things you were doing before?
For many of us, we may even neglect taking care of ourselves. We skip our meals and we find it hard to sleep. Or we may sleep all day and not move at all.
Should we stop caring for ourselves when our loved one dies?
What Your Loved One Would Have Wanted
One very important thing to keep in mind is to think about what your loved one would have wanted for you. If he or she were still living, how would that person want to see you? Would your loved one be happy seeing you neglect yourself? Would it be that person’s desire to see you give up on life?
While it may be hard to imagine, try to look back at those times when a loved one was still alive. Try to remember those times when that person reminded you to eat or to take a good rest when you don’t feel well. Even when you can’t recall such times, imagine how your loved one must be feeling when seeing you now.
Sometimes, you take care of yourself not because you feel like doing so but because you want to honor the memory of someone who cares for you.
Wherever they may be, you want to assure them that you are doing your best to survive. Yes, you may be grieving. But you are trying to make it day by day. You don’t want your loved one to feel burdened. You want to send a message instead that you’re going to be fine.
For The People Who Are Still With You
You must also remember the many people are still by your side. If you are a parent, you must have other children who depend upon you. If you are someone’s child, you have parents who’d worry about what’s happening to you.
Aside from your close family, you have other people who want to see you doing well. While you may not see them everyday, you are still someone who matters to someone else. It may be a far relative or a co-worker. It may be a former classmate or a friend.
You may not feel it now, but you are still connected to a lot of people. They care for you. And you try to take care of yourself for them as well.
For Those You Haven’t Met Yet
Your life would still go and you will continue to make new friends and acquaintances. You will meet people who will care for you. People whose lives would be better because they have met you.
They may not have a face yet in your mind today, but they, too, would want to see you survive.
How Do You Start Taking Care of Yourself?
When you are grieving, even the simple things don’t seem to be that simple anymore. You may feel that the routine you have practiced daily has suddenly become burdensome. But you must do even the basic things for your survival. Don’t think about the far future. Just do what you have to do for the day.
Here are some things you should consider doing daily:
1. Eat your meals
There’s nothing as important for your survival as eating your meals. Your physical body needs to be nourished to go on. Even the task of crying would be a struggle if you don’t even have the strength to cry.
2. Get enough sleep
Why not use your time of sleep to rest your aching heart? Let your body find time to recover the strength you have lost. Surrender your worries as you let body and mind rest for the night.
3. Move a little
While you should take some time to rest, you should also remember to have some exercise. Move a little. Take a short walk outside. The sunshine and the fresh air would be good for your recovery and healing.
4. Take a shower
You shouldn’t forget your hygiene even when you grieve. A warm bath could make a lot of difference while you’re healing.
Final Thoughts
Time may have stopped for the loved one you have lost, but don’t let time stop for your life as well. Don’t you know that a part of your loved one still lives on within you?
You have the responsibility to live your life in such a way that could honor the memory of your loved one. Live for those whom you have lost as though they are still in the world, touching other people, moving lives and making this world a happier place to be.
Grief and Alexa’s Feature of Mimicking Your Deceased Loved One’s Voice
There’s something about grief that changes us. It changes the way that we see life. It changes not only how we view the future but how we look back at the past.
Sometimes grief makes us look at the past with regret. Sometimes we become trapped in our memories that we never want to move on with life anymore.
But what if you can hear your deceased loved one’s voice again?What if you can somehow talk to a voice that resembles that of the person you lost?
Will this possibility help you heal and process your grief? Or will this only let your wounds linger, breaking your heart just a little longer until you could no longer stand the pain of your loss?
Alexa’s New Feature
An article from CNN recently reported how Amazon’s Alexa will soon have the feature of mimicking our deceased loved ones’ voices. For those who have lost their mother, father or any close family member or special someone, they can soon hear them again through a gadget that can interact with them in a limited way.
This innovation will be a part of an update to Amazon’s voice assistant where Alexa will soon be able to mimic any voice, including the voice of your loved one.
Dwelling on Memories
If this new feature of Alexa works, we’d soon be able to virtually travel back in time through the memories of the people we have lost. Hearing their voices would bring us back to those days when they were still with us, when we can ask them a question and they can talk back to us.
If mere photos and video recordings can help us recall our better days with our loved ones, a voice assistant that sounds just like them could change our everyday life. Imagine waking up in the morning through a voice that resembles that of your deceased spouse. Or imagine doing research through the voice of a dear friend who just passed away.
The Loss in our Hearts
The one drawback, however, is that at the end of the day, no matter how much those voices sound alike, you know that you can’t bring back to life your loved ones who passed away. Alexa may sound like them, but they are not Alexa.
The sound of their voices may bring you comfort from time to time, but at other times, hearing these voices may only remind you more of your loss. They can amplify that feeling of helplessness, your powerlessness to actually talk to those people that you loved.
After the death of those close to me, I appreciate looking at photos that remind me of them. But a time came when I felt that the more I looked at those photos, the more that I missed them, and the more I felt the pain in my heart for losing them.
Maybe the same would be true for other people and the use of artificial intelligence devices like Alexa. They would have to determine for themselves if hearing their loved ones’ voices again could comfort them or if this could only prevent them from healing and moving on.
Final Thoughts
I think that love, more than any other thing urges us to search for the eternal. It just doesn’t seem right to have death end all that is good and beautiful in life.
And so we do all we can, even after our loved ones have passed away to stay with them. We keep their photos and we look at them from time to time. We listen to their voice recordings at times when we miss them so much. But nothing can ever replace the presence of those whom we have loved. Their legacy is beyond the physical keepsakes we hold in our hands. Their true legacies are those timeless memories that we hold in our hearts.
In her book, “On Death and Dying”, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross presented a model of the 5 grief stages when people are faced with their own mortality. Through the years, this model had been used to also help other people facing various kinds of grief. Among this grief is when a person has lost or is about to lose a loved one.
If you are facing the loss of someone you love, these stages may help you to better understand the kind of emotional state you are going through.
It should be noted, however, that while these 5 grief stages describe the common experiences of people who undergo the grieving process, they do not strictly occur in the order presented. Further, some stages may overlap or may even be completely missing in one’s personal experience. It all depends upon the unique experience of a person in the face of losing a very important person in one’s life.
Not every person has the same memory nor the same set of circumstances. One may have a stronger support system while another may be more emotionally prepared. In the end, we can take comfort in some of our common strugglesand somehow feel less alone when faced with the pain of losing someone we love.
Here are the The Five Stages of Grief according to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross:
1. Denial
When faced with unbearable loss, our first reaction could be of total denial. We don’t want to believe that a certain thing could ever be true. How could such a sad thing be true?
We’d rather believe we’re dreaming or someone has just told us a lie. No, we’ve just talked with our loved one yesterday. How could they suddenly be gone? How could it be so impossible now to talk to them again?
Maybe they’ve identified the wrong person. Or perhaps it’s not too late to revive our loved one back to life. Could it be that we’ve heard something incorrectly?
We deny something because we want to postpone the bad news for as long as we can. We feel that we’re not ready yet. We haven’t prepared enough. We want to pretend nothing has changed and that no one has taken our loved one away.
2. Anger
Anger is that stage when we feel so helpless because we could no longer deny the loss of someone we love. It’s the result of our frustration and all our other pent up emotions coming together and being released at last.
Why her? Or why him? Why now?
We can’t understand why something so tragic has happened that we feel injured beyond measure. We want someone to take the blame for it all. We want to express all of our hatred to the cause of our suffering.
It can’t be fair. Our loved one was just so innocent or young. Or even when old age had already come, we can’t believe that someone so good could just be taken away from life.
Somehow, we want to take control. We want our anger to at least make us feel as though we could still do something.
After the first surge of anger has calmed down a bit, we start to look for a compromise.If your loved one has not yet passed away but has been pronounced with a terminal illness, you want to bargain even for a miracle. You pray. You promise to do something if only your loved one would be healed.
On the other hand, if you have already lost the person, you try to bring back those times when he or she was still alive. You may think about your regrets and your last actions. You may start to believe that if only this or that never happened, your loved one could still be alive.
You replay the past over and over again. You talk about what happened to people as though replaying the past could turn back the hands of time.
4. Depression
This is the point when you have realized there is nothing you could do. You tried to deny the truth but you were faced with the facts. You start to find someone to blame, but you’ve realized that blaming someone could never bring back the person you love.
At this critical phase in grieving, you feel so powerless you no longer know what to do next. Where could you possibly escape from that dark place you’ve just found yourself living in? How do you carry a burden that seems so heavy to bear?
Days go by and you couldn’t care for the usual activities you used to have. You find it hard to look forward to something. You lose your motivation to interact with people. You may find yourself spending more and more time alone.
5. Acceptance
Most commonly referred to as the last stage in the grieving process, acceptance is finally coming to terms with your loss. It doesn’t mean that you feel totally healed. It doesn’t mean that you would no longer be sad. But acceptance is that part of your journey in grief when you begin to sense peace again.
With acceptance, the truth of your loved one’s passing slowly sinks in. You no longer let anger or regret control you. You regain a sense of composure accepting that you have lost a very important part of your life, but along the way, you remember that you do not lose everything.
You still have your memories.You believe that you have become a better person because of the person that you would always love.
In this stage, you still feel the pain of your loved one’s absence, but somehow, you are more confident of holding on to more than the physical presence of the person you love. You start to do some of your routine activities again. You find a way to live in a new way while honoring the love and the memories of the person you’re grieving for.
Final Thoughts
There is no solid timeline for healing when it come to grief. Even the 5 grief stages can change, depending on how you cope with your loss. You can move back and forth through some of these stages. You can also skip some parts or dwell longer in other areas.
What’s important is to value your experience and to honor the life of the person you love by also taking care of yourself. Your life had been enriched by that person you value so much. Make the legacy of that person’s life help you to heal, adjust your perspective and live your life each day with gratitude and love.
Grief can be so overwhelming that we often it hard to understand what it really means. How would our lives be changed when we’re grieving? Could we ever go back to the time before our loved one’s death? Grief quotes can sometimes help us connect with other people who went through the process of grieving and losing the ones they loved the most. Through quotes and other excerpts, we somehow feel that we’re not alone. In an indirect way, they also give us hope.
Below are some of the quotes that can give you comfort when you are coping with grief. May you find in them some words of wisdom and consolation while dealing with the hard times. And may you face each day with courage knowing that for every day that you live, you carry your loved ones also within your heart.
Grief Quotes for sharing:
“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” — Helen Keller
“In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life”
– Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
– E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving
“Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.” – William Faulkner
“Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
– José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love
“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite”
– Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” – John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”
– Apollon Maykov
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
– Anne Lamott
“We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world–the company of those who have known suffering.” – Helen Keller
“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.” – Arthur Golden
“I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.” – Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
– Leo Tolstoy
“Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.”
– Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
“The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see–the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.” – Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
“Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” – Keanu Reeves
“Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.” – Alphonse de Lamartine
“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” – Euripides
“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.”
– Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember
“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
– John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses. ”
– Colette
“grief is a house where no one can protect you
where the younger sister
will grow older than the older one
where the doors
no longer let you in
or out”
– Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
“When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” – Kahlil Gibran
“Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.” – Ranata Suzuki
“The song is ended but the melody lingers on.” – Irving Berlin
“Words are like nets – we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.” – Jodi Picoult
“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.”
– Kevin Arnold
“It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.”
– Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
“Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.” – Earl Grollman
“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.”- Eskimo Proverb
“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope” – Elizabeth Gilbert (Grief Quote from Eat, Pray, Love)
“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”
– Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
“Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it.”
– Dean Koontz, Odd Hours
Sometimes, these grief quotes speak aloud what we can only cry in silence.
“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.” – Pablo Neruda
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” – William Shakespeare, Macbeth
“Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.”
– Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (Grief Quote from The Little Prince)
“The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.”
– Dean Koontz, Odd Hours
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
“You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.” – Mandy Hale
“grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us
grief is a house that disappears
each time someone knocks at the door
or rings the bell
a house that blows into the air
at the slightest gust
that buries itself deep in the ground
while everyone is sleeping”
– Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
“In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams … that is where you and I shall meet.” – Lewis Carroll
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” – Mark Twain
“There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.” – Victoria Alexander
What grief quotes can you relate to the most?
“Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.” – Paulo Coelho
“When it is darkest, we can see the stars.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” – Thomas Campbell
“Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.” -Jodi Picoult
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” – Winnie the Pooh
“Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.” – Sarah Dessen
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” – Dr. Seuss
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” – Pierre Auguste Renoir
“And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
– Maya Angelou
“Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”- Mitch Albom
“I dont know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every part of my body is broken too. ”- Chloe Woodward
“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” – Aeschylus
“At the blueness of the skies and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.” – Sylvan Kamens & Rabbi Jack Reimer
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” – J.M. Barrie
“Tears are the silent language of grief.” – Voltaire
“Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.”
– Nicholas Sparks, (Grief Quote from A Walk to Remember)
“I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.”- Rachel Joyce
“You gave me a forever within the numbered days…” – John Green, The Fault In Our Stars
“Walk on with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.” – Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel
“I don’t think that we’re meant to understand it all the time. I think that sometimes we just have to have faith.” – Nicholas Sparks, (Grief Quote from A Walk to Remember)
“The grave itself is but a covered bridge, Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend
“Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Honest listening is one of the best medicines we can offer the dying and the bereaved.”- Jean Cameron
“Our grief is as individual as our lives.” – Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.”- Alphonse de Lamartine
“Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.”- Jojo Moyes
“Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” – Vicki Harrison
“There is an ocean of silence between us… and I am drowning in it.” – Ranata Suzuki
“When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.” – Pat Schweibert
“Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tell us to tell each other right now that we love each other.” – Leo Buscaglia
“A sad smile crossed her face, and I knew right then what she was trying to tell me. Her eyes never left mine as she finally said the words that numbed my soul.
‘I’m dying, Landon.’”
– Nicholas Sparks, (Grief Quote from A Walk to Remember)
“But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.”- Veronica Roth, Allegiant
“’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” – John Steinbeck
“When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as
the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
– Khalil Gibran, (Grief Quote from The Prophet)
“…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.”
– Ranata Suzuki
There is a kind of beauty that can only be found when you weep
I used to think that in order to be beautiful, I had to be the happy type of person — the girl who always had a big smile on her face, the one who can always cheer other people and lighten everyone’s mood. Unfortunately, I’m a melancholic type of person. Somehow, I felt I’ve always carried some sort of sadness in me that could never be fully erased no matter how I tried to behave differently.
For a long time I felt as though unless I changed who I am, I could never be beautiful. People gravitate towards those who can make them laugh, people who can make them forget their troubles. I, on the other hand, am the boring one, the quiet one. Who’d ever want to know someone like me?
Through the years, however, I’ve realized how wrong I was. It isn’t only laughter that can bind people. It isn’t only the fun times that we can offer to those whom we love. People can also come to us because we are capable of listening to them. People can also come to us because we can understand their wounds. In a mysterious kind of way, even sorrow can be beautiful.
What Is Beauty?
“Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.” ? Mark Oliver Everett, Things The Grandchildren Should Know
Beauty is something that touches us and captivates us. It is something we desire and crave for, like the body’s hunger for bread. It is something we have always wanted to possess but cannot, a certain bliss that comes to us only in between times of waiting when in brief moments we experience what it’s like to live in eternity.
To explain beauty is like trying to explain love. It is something that gives meaning to our lives even though we cannot fully understand it. It may make itself known through the senses, but its true essence could only be felt by that spiritual sense within.
Thus, we say we have found beauty in joy because we have felt something in joy that makes our hearts swell and our spirits rise. Yet the same could be said with sorrow, because within sorrow we feel something that enables us to transcend beyond the world we have always known. It is beauty that gives us a hint about the meaning of life, about what it means to be a human being.
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”? C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
What Is Sadness?
“Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”? Sylvia Plath
Not everyone may be acquainted with happiness, but each one, to some extent, has been touched by some kind of pain or suffering. We have all traveled this valley of tears, and each one has his or her wound to tend to.
We may not know each other well, but we could all relate to the hurt each one felt for the loss of a loved one, for the injustice experienced, for the rejection and judgment one has received at one time or the other.
And because of this, we each have the capacity to reach out to another. We each have the chance to be compassionate, to show mercy, to love.
They who have experienced true sorrow are the ones who can best comfort those who mourn. They who have felt the most pain are the ones who can best assist those who struggle with anguish.
Beauty In Sadness
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”? Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
People who have been through painful times are beautiful because they’re the ones who can touch our lives the most with their wisdom and compassion. Their scars remind us of our own wounds. Their tears are like fountains of benevolence that can refresh us with kindness and gentleness.
They who appear to be happy without experiencing sorrow may not have the kind of heart that can connect with those who are suffering. They are not acquainted with our miseries and our shame. They can show their concern for us, but they can never support us as deeply as those who have gone to the depths of true grief.
Are we not attracted to works of art that depict a kind of sadness that resemble the sorrow of our own hearts? Do we not find something beautiful in movie characters who are crying their hearts out, struggling to survive, sacrificing their very lives for the sake of those whom they love? Even music becomes so much more enchanting when it’s melancholic, haunting and ethereal.
“When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.” — Franz Schubert
There is something beautiful in the eyes of those who know how to cry. There is something powerful in the stories of people who have gone through unimaginable suffering and pain. It’s as though they have reached the threshold of another world. It’s as though they have touched the very limits of our capacities as human beings. Who are they whom we consider as heroes and saints other than those who have tasted the most sorrow for the sake of love?
Beautiful people don’t just happen. They can’t just make themselves appear to be so. This is because beauty would always reveal itself from the inside out. It cannot be hidden long. You can see it in their eyes, in the way they talk, even in the way they move towards you.
Inner Beauty
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.” — Kahlil Gibran
Sorrow can soften one’s heart. Through sorrow, we become much more than people who need to survive. We become someone who can understand another person’s pain. In this way, sorrow builds compassion. Sorrow becomes a bridge towards love.
Sorrow can also lead to peace. We often fill our lives with activities in pursuit of something we could never attain. In doing so, we give way to anxiety and much worrying. We tremble at the thought of losing some goal or opportunity. We seem to be abundant in all things, but we are truly empty within.
When the things we feared most suddenly happens and we lose everything, sorrow finally comes. We taste the bitterness of defeat as we surrender to our loss. As we surrender, however, we realize how we have wasted so much time and effort in worrying. Now that our dreaded moment has arrived, we realize that we could still go on. We are still who we are and it is enough to start again.
Last but not the least, sorrow leads to a deeper joy. Once we have tasted the bitter cup of grief, we are now capable of tasting the sweetness of true happiness. Our eyes have finally been opened. We already know what things are trivial and what things are truly precious. We no longer concern ourselves with small irritations because we have fixed our eyes upon the eternal and lasting joys.
A Glimpse of Beauty
“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides.” — Audrey Hepburn
Beauty starts within, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be seen in our eyes, in our smile or in our countenance.
When you look into the eyes of sorrow, you can sometimes see your own reflection. It’s as though you were hidden in someone else’s heart.
When you see brief moments of joy from someone who carries a deep sorrow in her heart, you see not only a face that’s smiling upon you. You also see the generosity of someone who longs to make you happy despite the suffering she is going through.
When you hear the voice of someone who has been acquainted with deep sorrow, you hear gentleness, compassion and mercy. You hear someone who respects you and does not judge you for your mistakes.
When you feel the touch of someone who knows how to be sad, you feel that sort of connection that touches your own heart. You know that someone is willing to support you and to listen to you even as you cry.
When people have light in themselves, it can’t help but shine. One famous song titled Anthem by Leonard Cohen goes like this, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” In a way, I think the light that comes in can also come out through the same crack. When sorrow creates a crack that lets the light in, somehow, that same light finds its way to shine for others, too. It’s that kind of light that makes sorrow beautiful inside and out.
“You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.”? Oscar Wilde
