Joanne Cacciatore Quotes

When we love deeply, we mourn deeply; extraordinary grief is an expression of extraordinary love. Grief and love mirror each other; one is not possible without the other.

Grief is not a medical disorder to be cured. Grief is not spiritual crisis to be resolved. Grief is not a social woe to be addressed. Grief is, simply, a matter of the heart — to be felt.

Only there, only when ready, will we be able to blossom (albeit painfully) into a joy that cohabitates with grief — rather than displacing or replacing it.

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. . . . The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. — C.S. LEWIS

When others call into question our grief, defy our perennial relationship with those we love who have died, treat us as anathema and avoid us, and push us toward healing before we are ready, they simply redouble our burden.

In a sense, the process of mourning is an outward expression of that love that now has no physical or interpersonal place to be enacted. It’s

The invitation to surrender to grief is about the middle path, straddling both worlds — life and death.

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving. The word emotion has its roots in the Latin movere and emovere meaning "to move through" and "to move out". Our emotions move in us, move through us and move between us.And when we allows them to move freely, they change, perhaps scarcely and perhaps gradually - but inevitably. This is grief's most piercing message: there is no way arounf - the only way in through.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love, and it would be wrong to try and find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation. It remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. — DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

To fully inhabit grief is to hold the contradictions of the great mystery that loss shatters us and we become whole. Grief empties us and we are filled with emotion. Fear paralyzes us and we lend courage to another. We mourn our beloved's absence and we invoke their presence. We cease to exist as we once were and we become more fully human. We know the darkest of all nights and in so doing can bring the light of our loved ones into the world. We are the paradox. We are the bearers of the unbearable.

The world breaks us all, and afterward some are stronger in those broken places.

Is it painful? Oh, yes — beyond all words. Yet we slowly learn to stay with our own pain. We learn we don’t have to check out to endure.

Suffering endured becomes compassion expressed. Grieving becomes giving.

To love means to open ourselves to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and thus an intensity of consciousness that before we did not know was possible. — ROLLO MAY

Others may tell us that it’s time to “move on” or that this is “part of some bigger plan” — because our shattering makes them feel uneasy, vulnerable, at risk. Some may avoid us, others pity us. But this grief is ours. We have earned this grief, paying for it with love and steadfast devotion. We own this pain, even on days when we wish it weren’t so. We needn’t give it away or allow anything, or anyone, to pilfer it.

It almost seems that the only way to eradicate our grief would be to relinquish the love we feel — to disassemble our loved one’s place in our lives. But checking in with the wisdom of our heart, we see that is impossible. Grief and love occur in tandem.

STAY MINDFULLY CLOSE to the sensations of early grief because it is a memorial to the raw pain so ubiquitous in the newly bereaved; I find that my attention to it directs and intensifies my sense of what I think of as fierce compassion. Fierce compassion is another artifact of fully inhabited grief.

But happiness and grief are not competitors. That is a myth perpetrated by a culture that is foolishly obsessed with pursuing one and dangerously avoiding the other.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. — VIKTOR FRANKL

When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about. — HARUKI MURAKAMI

Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret to redemption lies in remembrance. — RICHARD VON WEIZSÄCKER

The road of sorrow is not easy. It is ominous, jarring, and narrow.

Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action. — NORMAN FISCHER

REPRESSED GRIEF ravages individuals and dismantles families; its tragic effects seep like groundwater into communities and societies. And the emotional economics of grief denied its rightful place are grim.

I remember asking how the world could continue spinning after such a tragedy. I wanted to scream at the cars driving past the cemetery. I wanted to yell at the birds in the trees casting shadows on her headstone. I wanted the grass to stop growing and the clouds to stop floating

Being the mother of a child who has died is a tragic privilege — one for which I never asked and certainly never wanted. Yet here I am — and here you are — unbearably wounded. It is the bereaved who are awakened from the slumber of self-satisfaction. It is the bereaved who can heal our world.

There are two kinds of suffering,” Ajahn Chah told him, “the suffering we run from because we are unwilling to face the truth of life and the suffering that comes when we’re willing to stop running from the sorrows and difficulties of the world. The second kind of suffering will lead you to freedom.

And I surrender because long past the early days, grief’s shadow still remains. It lurks and lingers. It is both feared enemy and beloved companion who never leaves. Grief calls for us to give ourselves back to it. To remember. To reclaim. To re-grieve. And for all those things, even when they sting, I am thankful.

is one’s duty to love those we do not see. — SØREN

Find those who are willing to join you and walk with you nonjudgmentally. Steer clear of those who claim to have a cure for your grief.

As grievers, we may feel tired and may not have the energy to engage with others in meaningful ways. We may feel less patient and tolerant. Perhaps we have not yet learned how to openly share our feelings, or we have not found others willing to deeply listen, or we do not feel safe doing so. Many grievers report that they lose old friends — and sometimes gain new ones — as their dyadic relationships shift.

Traumatic death provokes traumatic grief. And traumatic death refers to any sudden and unexpected death, violent or disfiguring death, death following prolonged suffering, suicide, homicide, and the death of a child at any age and from any cause. When someone we love dies traumatically, we feel frighteningly uprooted, markedly insecure, and our ability to trust in the world feels gravely threatened — and indeed it is gravely threatened. The

Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the realm of sameness. This is called the unity of opposites, and it liberates us from a myopic, dualistic view of our emotions as either/or.

did not know that she could go away, and take our lives with her, yet leave our dull-bodies behind. . . . How am I to comprehend this? How am I to have it? Why am I robbed, and who is benefited? — MARK TWAIN

Grief violates convention: it is raw, primal, seditious, chaotic, writhing, and most certainly uncivilized. Yet grief is an affirmation of human passion, and only those who are apathetic, who stonewall love, who eschew intimacy can escape grief’s pull.

No intervention and no interventionist can “cure” our grief. And we are not broken — we are brokenhearted.

WE PAUSE to be with grief, joining the rebellion against a hedonistic culture of happiness-at-all-costs and reclaiming our rightful feelings. We learn to just be without needing to tame, alter, or displace our emotions. This is radically countercultural, even revolutionary, when all other social forces merge to quell, overcome,

Always go too far because that is where you will find the truth. — ALBERT CAMUS

She found herself fantasizing about dying in order to be with Kyle. She didn’t literally want to die; she simply wished, with all her might, to rewind time. She wanted Kyle back. His return was the only thing that would remedy her irremediable pain. Her body, mind, heart, and soul were in a state of protest. WE

But when we are frightened and in pain, we need others with whom we can be honest. We need others who can enter the abyss with us, sometimes again and again. We need to reach out to someone who is safe, who will not judge, who will not shut down or shun our pain. And, when we are hurting this much, we may need to borrow, muster, or scrape up the courage to reach out to others. And we need these things for an indefinite period.

There is, I am convinced, no picture that conveys in all its dreadfulness, a vision of sorrow, despairing, remediless, supreme. If I could paint such a picture, the canvas would show only a woman looking down at her empty arms. — CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Though I think not to think about it, I do think about it and shed tears thinking about it. — RYOKAN

Personally, I benefit immensely from element-gazing: watching clouds, seeing the wind stirring leaves, building a campfire and watching the dance of the flames, observing the movement of water in a fountain or a stream, focusing on a patch of earth while contemplating the otherwise imperceptible microscopic movements.

My barefoot hiking practice, rich in metaphors, is a compelling medium for me. While it’s not for everyone, many others I’ve worked with have also integrated various aspects of it as part of their own practice. For me, walking barefoot is a way of being with grief.

The liberating thing about understanding grief this way is that, as with the uniqueness of our fingerprint, every person’s “grief-print” — their individual process of being with grief — will be different.

We are destroyed, and then we seek to enact that destruction somewhere, to give it form,” I said. “And that destruction can come out against self or other.

won’t stop grieving until I stop loving her.

So many factors affect any specific manifestation of grief: our relationship to the person who died, the way they died, the degree of our love and shared connection, relational dependence, early death rituals, how we’re treated during the loss, how we were notified, how others interacted with us in the aftermath, our view of the world, our spiritual path and inclinations, previous history of loss and trauma, and who we are at our core. All these things deeply influence our experience of grief, and grief rituals may be similarly unique. It

The depth and breadth of the loss is unfathomable, and its full impact is never realized immediately, but only gradually over time. The mind tries to protect us from near-lethal initial shock, and a type of emotional anesthesia often ensues so that we may feel as if we are in a movie or operating in slow motion. Sounds, figures, and movements change, and we may exist in a profoundly altered state of consciousness.

Many parents with whom I’ve worked tell me they feel their old self, the person they had been, has died.

She learned that grief was not the enemy and that its shadow would not swallow or annihilate her. She adapted, made space for the grief to exist, and allowed it to be whatever it was, moment by moment. Eventually, she started to notice that she was able to endure, to suffer, and the edges of grief softened on their own and in their own time. Karen had felt disconnected from her body, and so she and I also worked on the physicality of trauma. We hiked together, sometimes barefoot. Eventually, when she felt ready, she took up yoga. She began to reinhabit both her mind and her body. Today,

Our holy place is holy still; our love is not diminished by absence or by pain. Death has but interrupted our loving, and I know I shall see you again, if the world lasts. — NANCY WOOD

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving. The word emotion has its roots in the Latin movere and emovere meaning "to move through" and "to move out." Our emotions move in us, move through us and move between us. And when we allow them to move freely, they change, perhaps scarcely and perhaps gradually - but inevitably. This is grief's piercing message: there is no way around - the only way is through.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night,” the late Elie Wiesel recognized.

Death feels savage, and to some extent, it is — but grief need not be vilified.

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief. — WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

When others call into question our grief, defy our perennial relationship with those we love who have died, treat us as anathema and avoid us, and push us toward healing before we are ready, they simply redouble our burden. It almost seems that the only way to eradicate our grief would be to relinquish the love we feel — to disassemble our loved one’s place in our lives. But checking in with the wisdom of our heart, we see that is impossible. Grief and love occur in tandem.

May there be such a oneness between us that when one weeps the other tastes salt. — KAHLIL GIBRAN

Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that which is legitimately ours to feel, we rebel against the rigid grief-denying structures of society.

In a culture like our own that is addicted to the relentless quest to feel happy — perhaps as an unconscious attempt to bypass our disavowed misery — grief is taboo, pathologized, and aggressively avoided. Grievers are advised to “look on the bright side,” “think positive,” and “count your blessings.” When such empty platitudes don’t work — basically always — people who experience anguish may often be numbed with drugs. And this leaves victims of loss and grief guilty or shame-ridden about their sadness and without the resources to handle their pain.

The more difficult the journey, the greater the depth of purification. — SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET

I am present with life because I am present with death. I know joy and peace because I am present with grief and suffering.