Overwhelming Grief Quotes

There is a sacredness in tears....They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a 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.

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.

Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.

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.

For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

Time slowed, and stilled. It was just the two of us, me murmuring in the empty, sunlit room. Will didn't say much. He didn't answer back, or add a dry comment, or scoff. He nodded occasionally, his head pressed against mine, and murmured, or let out a small sound that could have been satisfaction at another good memory. "It has been, the best six months of my entire life." "Funnily enough, Clark, mine too." And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn't bear it.

And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

I haven't cried. But sometimes I feel as if my veins are leaking, as if my body is overwhelmed, as if I'm drowning from the inside.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: “WHY?” And here is the best answer I can give: Because. Because sometimes, life is damned unfair. Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply. Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm’s way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it. Because sometimes there aren’t really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time. Because acceptance is yet another of life’s “here’s a side of hurt” lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there. Why, you ask? Because, I answer. Inadequate yet true.

Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever.

It’s possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it’s not so overwhelming.

And Nephilim—we tend to love very overwhelmingly. To fall in love only once, to die of grief over love—my old tutor used to say that the hearts of the Nephilim were like hearts of angels: They felt every human pain, and never healed.

The world is too fucking big. Sometimes, I can't even carry myself through all the love and fear.

If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion

Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 21, 1864. Dear Madam,-- I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours, very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln

There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.

Here sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation echoed throughout the starless air of Hell; at first these sounds resounding made me weep: tongues confused, a language strained in anguish with cadences of anger, shrill outcries and raucous groans that joined with sounds of hands, raising a whirling storm that turns itself forever through that air of endless black, like grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows. And I, in the midst of all this circling horror, began, "Teacher, what are these sounds I hear? What souls are these so overwhelmed by grief?" And he to me: "This wretched state of being is the fate of those sad souls who lived a life but lived it with no blame and with no praise. They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angels neither faithful nor unfaithful to their God, who undecided stood but for themselves. Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out, but even Hell itself would not receive them, for fear the damned might glory over them." And I. "Master, what torments do they suffer that force them to lament so bitterly?" He answered: "I will tell you in few words: these wretches have no hope of truly dying, and this blind life they lead is so abject it makes them envy every other fate. The world will not record their having been there; Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from them. Let's not discuss them; look and pass them by...

      “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 messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love.” ~ Washington Irving

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 messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.”                                                    ~ Washington Irving

The black color is much deeper than to be overwhelmed by grief… Black hides everything within itself in the argument of elegance.

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

All along I believed that I was important to Travis; that he needed me. But in that moment, I felt like the shiny new toy Parker said I was. He wanted to prove to Parker that I was still his. His. “I’m nobody’s,” I said to the empty room. As the words sunk in, I was overwhelmed with the grief I’d felt from the night before. I belonged to no one. I’d never felt so alone in my life.

He was overwhelmed by the desire to drop down to his knees and grab Ty’s hands, and hold him the way he had on the rooftop in London when Livvy had been hurt.

And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking. They would indeed be aghast to see the mess I am now. This is not me, this is now who I was with them.

Enkidu, my brother, whom I loved so dearly, who accompanied me through every danger-- the fate of mankind has overwhelmed him. For six days I would not let him be buried, thinking, 'If my grief is violent enough, perhaps he will come back to life again.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.

I miss you so much in these wee morning hours, when the depth of the night sets my spirit free. When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the world but the beauty I pull out of it. I miss you throughout the day, as I come across glories and wonders that could easily overwhelm me, but just dull because you’re not here to enjoy them.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.

If we allow ourselves even for a moment to contemplate the vast weight of suffering in the world, we will easily be overwhelmed with grief. This is why we develop the habit and self-protective instinct of overlooking the suffering around us.

...although being "angry at God"--or at myself, or him, or anyone else--made no sense to me, I was often overwhelmed by sudden, intense bursts of anger that had no outlet, no appropriate target.

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.

Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.

In the Welsh language there is a particularly beautiful word: ‘Hiraeth’. It has no direct English translation, but the general sense of the term is an overwhelming feeling of grief and longing for one’s people and land of the past, a kind of amplified spiritual homesickness for a place one has never been to.

Can I see him again? Could I bear it? Do I want to see him? I close my eyes and tilt my head back as grief and longing lance through me. Of course I do. Perhaps-perhaps I can tell him I’ve changed my mind … No, no, no. I cannot be with someone who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on me, someone who can’t love me. Torturous memories flash through my mind-the gliding, holding hands, kissing, the bathtub, his gentleness, his humor, and his dark, brooding, sexy stare. I miss him. It’s been five days, five days of agony that has felt like an eternity. I cry myself to sleep at night, wishing I hadn’t walked out, wishing that he could be different, wishing that we were together. How long will this hideous overwhelming feeling last? I am in purgatory. I wrap my arms around my body, hugging myself tightly, holding myself together. I miss him. I really miss him…I love him. Simple.

And one more thing about the grocery store: many people get overwhelmed with all the things they no longer need to buy for the person they lost—there is no need for their favorite cookies or their morning tea.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

What happened?" I asked quietly. "I lost some people," [Rogan] said. There was an awful finality in his voice. I hadn't thought he cared. I'd thought he viewed his people as tools and took care of them because tools had to be kept in good repair, but this sounded like genuine grief — that complicated cocktail of guilt, regret, and overwhelming sadness you felt when someone close to you died. It broke you and made you feel helpess. Helpless wasn't even in Rogan's vocabulary.

That’s how grief works. Grief, depression, trauma. They overwhelm. They’re louder than the good things happening in your life. You can’t compartmentalize the darker aspects and put them in a box and think they won’t leach into the rest of your life.

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.

When you look at the world as it is, how can you not be racked with grief? But when you look closer, how can you not be overwhelmed with awe?

I was crazy with grief and loneliness, and most of all, with intense, overwhelming guilt that burned through every cell of my being hotter than a Devil's anvil.

There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and of unspeakable love. —Washington Irving

When we psychologize human suffering, we narrow our focus to the individual—perhaps in order to be less overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of human suffering, which, in the modern era, has reached a crescendo of atrocity. In doing so, we lose the connection to anything larger than our family of origin. The sense or meaning we give to pain keeps us stuck in a kind of narcissistic individualism that paradoxically fuels neurosis and emotional suffering.

She felt her in her heart all the time now, yearning for her lost love and lamenting for past mistakes. The Lady’s grief was overwhelming sometimes, making Sofia sad for no reason at all, especially at night when the world around her grew quiet and there were no distractions.

There is a great loneliness of spirit today. We’re trying to live, we’re trying to cope in the face of what seems to be overwhelming evidence that who we are doesn’t matter, that there is no real hope for enough change, that the environment and human experience is deteriorating so rapidly and increasingly and massively. This is the context, psychically and spiritually, in which we are working today. This is how our lives are reflected to us. Meanwhile, we’re yearning for connection with each other, with ourselves, with the powers of nature, the possibilities of being alive. When that tension arises, we feel pain, we feel anguish at the very root of ourselves, and then we cover that over, that grief, that horror, with all kinds of distraction – with consumerism, with addictions, with anything that we can use to disconnect and to go away. We’ve been opening ourselves to the grief, to the knowing of what’s taking place, the loss of species, the destruction of the natural world, the unimaginable levels of social injustice and economic injustice that deprive so many human beings of basic opportunities. And as we open to the pain of that, there’s a possibility of embracing that pain and that grief in a way that it becomes a strength, a power to respond. There is the possibility that the energy that has been bound in the repression of it can now flow through us and energize us, make us clearer, more alive, more passionate, committed, courageous, determined people.

My aloneness had never bothered me; I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.

Scott is gone. I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.

People are more likely to fall intensely in love when they are anxious and their self-esteem is lowest.... Feeling inadequate, unhappy, and empty are virtual prerequisites for falling and staying desperately in love; at least temporarily, the ecstasy of desire seems to cure everything that ails you. There is a connection between aversive states of mind -- loneliness, shame, even grief and horror -- and a propensity to feel overwhelming passion; this is one reason why romances blossom in times of war or natural disasters, as well as during the private disasters of our everyday lives.

HONESTY is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth. The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of grief that is conferred upon even the most average life. Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.

Grief was a capricious companion. Sometimes distant and aloof. Sometimes so overwhelming it was hard to think a straight thought. Its mood changed at whim, making it emotionally exhausting to keep up.

Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts.

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams.

Do not seek anywhere but within for love. Do not build walls preventing love from entering, rather build an aura around you that is penetrable to allow a flow of love to constantly go through you. We are but a mere vessel of love. This vessel is connected to all things. Love is channeled through all these streams and it is constantly flowing. If an attempt is made to contain this love, it will break the dam thus causing an overwhelming amount of grief and sense of drowning. When love is allowed to flow naturally without trying to possess it, it gives one all that is needed. It protects you. It serves you. It guides you. And most of all it loves you. Love is meant to flow. Embrace the flow. It is always going through you. Do not ever doubt it. Love connects us all. The all is love itself, so that includes you. You are never without love. In fact, you ARE love.

Doctors, soldiers, and mothers encounter it routinely; I had, any number of times. Unable to respond to an immediate emergency while clouded by fatigue, the mind simply withdraws a little, separating itself fastidiously from the body’s overwhelming self-centered needs. From this clinical distance, it can direct things, bypassing emotions, pain, and tiredness, making necessary decisions, cold-bloodedly overruling the mindless body’s needs for food, water, sleep, love, grief, pushing it past its fail-safe points.

When you fill a clogged drain with more water than it can hold, it’s bound to overflow and contaminate everything around it. When grief overwhelms someone, when they are enraged at what fate has done to them, their fury often overflows and is inflicted upon the world.

I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked …and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been holding myself…Mostly I’ve been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it’s coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely…It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there’s a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon.

Show me an activist who is so overwhelmed by darkness that they can't feel joy, and I'll show you a useless activist. Grief and anger are powerful motivators. In our case, the sparked a movement and helped it grow. But it was sustained by a desperate need for community, happiness, and love.

I can tell you that it's okay to feel whatever it is you're feeling right now. It's okay to miss him and it's okay to hurt and it's okay to feel lost-just as long as you come to me, or your friends, or your family, when all those feelings try to overwhelm you. Because in amongst all those feelings, some of you are going to be angry, and some of you will need someone to blame. It's okay to be angry. I can't tell you if it's right or wrong to feel blame, but what I can say is don't be angry for too long and don't hold on to the blame forever. That kind of anger can take away a piece of you, a piece of you that you might not get back.

Long black hair and deep clean blue eyes and skin pale white and lips blood red she's small and thin and worn and damaged. She is standing there. What are you doing here? I was taking a walk and I saw you and I followed you. What do you want. I want you to stop. I breathe hard, stare hard, tense and coiled. There is still more tree for me to destroy I want that fucking tree. She smiles and she steps towards me, toward toward toward me, and she opens he r arms and I'm breathing hard staring hard tense and coiled she puts her arms around me with one hand not he back of my head and she pulls me into her arms and she holds me and she speaks. It's okay. I breathe hard, close my eyes, let myself be held. It's okay. Her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and my heart slows and I stop shaking an the Fury melts into her safety an she holds me and she says. Okay. Okay. Okay. Something else comes and it makes me feel weak and scared and fragile and I don't want to be hurt and this feeling is the feeling I have when I know I can be hurt and hurt deeper and more terribly than anything physical and I always fight it and control it and stop it but her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and if she let me go right now I would fall and the need and confusion and fear and regret and horror and shame and weakness and fragility are exposed to the soft strength of her open arms and her simple word okay and I start to cry. I start to cry. I want to cry. It comes in waves. THe waves roll deep and from deep the deep within me and I hold her and she holds me tighter and i let her and I let it and I let this and I have not felt this way this vulnerability or allowed myself to feel this way this vulnerability since I was ten years old and I don't know why I haven't and I don't know why I am now and I only know that I am and that it is scary terrifying frightening worse and better than anything I've ever felt crying in her arms just crying in her ams just crying. She guides me to the ground, but she doesn't let me go. THe Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, hell and their accompaniments are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss. THe loss inhabits, fills and overwhelms me. It is the loss of a childhood of being a Teeenager of normalcy of happiness of love of trust anon reason of God of Family of friends of future of potential of dignity of humanity of sanity f myself of everything everything everything. I lost everything and I am lost reduced to a mass of mourning, sadness, grief, anguish and heartache. I am lost. I have lost. Everything. Everything. It's wet and Lilly cradles me like a broken Child. My face and her shoulder and her shirt and her hair are wet with my tears. I slow down and I start to breathe slowly and deeply and her hair smells clean and I open my eyes because I want to see it an it is all that I can see. It is jet black almost blue and radiant with moisture. I want to touch it and I reach with one of my hands and I run my hand from the crown along her neck and her back to the base of her rib and it is a thin perfect sheer and I let it slowly drop from the tips of my fingers and when it is gone I miss it. I do it again and again and she lets me do it and she doesn't speak she just cradles me because I am broken. I am broken. Broken. THere is noise and voices and Lilly pulls me in tighter and tighter and I know I pull her in tighter and tighter and I can feel her heart beating and I know she can feel my heart beating and they are speaking our hearts are speaking a language wordless old unknowable and true and we're pulling and holding and the noise is closer and the voices louder and Lilly whispers. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay.

After a breakup, you may also feel physically and mentally incapacitated in some way. You have trouble sleeping, or you sleep too much. You become accident-prone. You have trouble putting a sentence together. You feel scattered and overwhelmed by feelings. You may doubt your ability to function, and maybe your sanity. The emotions seem so big and so unmanageable that you may be afraid that expressing your feelings will result in complete loss of function. This is normal. Grieving causes confusion and disorganization, as well as disturbance in appetite and sleep patterns. It may disrupt even the most benign daily activities. Grief continually calls attention to itself, and being in disarray is one of those attention-getting devices. It is also a result of your mind’s attempt to reorder the world, because the one it knew, the one it was structured around, is now gone.

It never occurred to me that the overwhelming emotional and physical impact was still yet to come.

Dying of grief is the ultimate sacrifice, but it is not evolutionarily feasible. If grief were that overwhelming, a species would simply be erased.

My Darling, It is late at night and though the words are coming hard to me, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s time that I finally answer your question. Of course I forgive you. I forgive you now, and I forgave you the moment I read your letter. In my heart, I had no other choice. Leaving you once was hard enough; to have done it a second time would have been impossible. I loved you too much to have let you go again. Though I’m still grieving over what might have been, I find myself thankful that you came into my life for even a short period of time. In the beginning, I’d assumed that we were somehow brought together to help you through your time of grief. Yet now, one year later, I’ve come to believe that it was the other way around. Ironically, I am in the same position you were, the first time we met. As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on. Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever. It would be easy for me to do that because loving someone else might diminish my memories of you. Yet, this is the paradox: Even though I miss you greatly, it’s because of you that I don’t dread the future. Because you were able to fall in love with me, you have given me hope, my darling. You taught me that it’s possible to move forward in life, no matter how terrible your grief. And in your own way, you’ve made me believe that true love cannot be denied. Right now, I don’t think I’m ready, but this is my choice. Do not blame yourself. Because of you, I am hopeful that there will come a day when my sadness is replaced by something beautiful. Because of you, I have the strength to go on. I don’t know if spirits do indeed roam the world, but even if they do, I will sense your presence everywhere. When I listen to the ocean, it will be your whispers; when I see a dazzling sunset, it will be your image in the sky. You are not gone forever, no matter who comes into my life. you are standing with God, alongside my soul, helping to guide me toward a future that I cannot predict. This is not a good-bye, my darling, this is a thank-you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. I love you

The more my own eyes began to open, the more overwhelming grief and anger I felt. With time, education, and support, this awakening turned into a growing strength and hope inside me. This will happen for you, too. Reading this book is going to be incredibly helpful for you as you begin to awaken to the truth of what you have been through. If you have lived with a covert narcissist, you have been held down for a long time. You have experienced the illusion of love, not the real thing. You have been lied to, manipulated, and controlled. You have not been heard or respected. You were devalued and brutally discarded by someone who said they cared about you, but in fact only cared about themselves. You have experienced an insanity-inducing relationship that is difficult to describe.

Almondine To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away. He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric. Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her. And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him. Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him. "ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor. And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

As Genji mused about the transitory nature of life, intense feelings of weariness and distaste for the world overwhelmed him. How much longer must he go on living in it now that he had been left behind?

Come to think of it, I could not even think of a movie or TV shows where they had a baby die, with the sole exception of a couple of episodes of “Little House on the Prairie” and perhaps soaps. I was beginning to understand this was truly “the” unspeakable loss, “the” invisible loss, a loss so great nobody wanted to talk about it; a loss so inconceivable and so horrible that many people declared it as being the most overwhelmingly painful experience of their life; the death of which they were least prepared for. I was beginning to understand. My grief was colossal and all-encompassing. No loss is more difficult to accept and feels more unnatural and less understood

simultaneously heavier and lighter. Han. There was no English equivalent, no translation. It was an overwhelming sorrow and regret, a grief and yearning so deep it pervades your soul—but with a sprinkling of resilience, of hope.

Hidden within the heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white man who’d given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the gentle hypnotism of the Rosary.

Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.

Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circles no grief or folly ventures.

earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.

Grief is time-limited. This fact gives us the courage and willingness to face grief. If we don’t resist the feeling of grief and totally surrender to it, it will run out in about 10–20 minutes; then it will stop for variable lengths of time. If we keep surrendering to it every time it comes up, then it will eventually run out. We just allow ourselves to experience it fully. We only have to tolerate an overwhelming grief for 10–20 minutes, and then all of a sudden it will disappear. If we resist the grief, then it will go on and on. Suppressed grief can go on for years.

Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings. Not even the worst grief leaves traces; when it feels so overwhelming and lasts for such a long time, it is not because the feelings have set, they can't do that, they stand still, the way water in a forest mere stands still.

And I wondered if I’d die like this. Die flying, soaring, rocketing to heights higher than I’d ever been. Would this be the eternity I’d be allowed to dwell in? In this overwhelming pleasure, so abundant, so consuming, so amplified that there wasn’t room for anything else. No room for fear or doubt or worry or shame or grief. Just this.

The Biden's have another belief as well:" If you have to ask, it's too late." When someone is in need, when they're hurting, when they're overwhelmed, you don't wait until they tell you they need your help. You give it before they have to ask. So when Neilia died and Joe was left with two young boys, trying to father them and get through his own grief, all while juggling the new hectic life of a senator, Val didn't ask if there was something she could do. She moved in. And for three years, through her own career ambitions, through her courtship and eventual marriage to her husband, Jack, she lived with Joe and the boys and made sure they had the love and support they needed to keep going.

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

Using a holistic, Eastern philosophy, leaky gut can be classified into four categories: candida gut, a fungal condition caused by too much fluid buildup in the body; stressed gut, caused by overwhelming presence of stress hormones; immune gut, caused by emotional pain and grief; and gastric gut, caused by overeating, bad chewing habits, and emotional turmoil.

Each of the following states of being is distinctly tied to one of the seven core emotions...Freedom, Passion, Enthusiasm, Positive Expectations, Optimism, Contentment, Boredom, Pessimism, Frustration, A sense of being overwhelmed, Disappointment, Doubt, Worry, Blame, Discouragement, Bitterness, Vengefulness, Hatred, Jealousy, Insecurity, Guilt, Unworthiness, Grief, Depression, Powerlessness, Inability to concerntrate

Do not seek anywhere but within for love. Do not build walls preventing love from entering, rather build an aura around you that is penetrable to allow a flow of love to constantly go through you. We are but a mere vessel of love. This vessel is connected to all things. Love is channeled through all these streams and it is constantly flowing. If an attempt is made to contain this love, it will break the dam thus causing an overwhelming amount of grief and sense of drowning. When love is allowed to flow naturally without trying to possess it, it gives one all that is needed. It protects you. It serves you. It guides you. And most of all it loves you. Love is meant to flow. Embrace the flow. It is always going through you. Do not ever doubt it. Love connects us all. The all is love itself, so that includes you. You are never without love. In fact, you ARE love.

we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew." ... Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions seem still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life.

Lying in the hotel bed, Hector conceded that, all through ’93, ’94, and ’95, an ever-widening river of good data, mixed with a steady ambient wash of self-importance, had anesthetized his grief. He’d needed that. But now a maw of emptiness and rage was opening beneath him. Idly, he rubbed his bare, trimmed chest beneath the sheets. He’d faithfully hit the gym through these past years of high-level consultancy, grunting out his misery over barbells and machines. His chest was broad and he wished beyond anything that the arm caressing it at this moment was Ricky’s, not his own. But that sunny, silly cutie, like a blond sliver of sunshine on the timeline that Hector envisioned as his life, had missed the drawbridge, along with Issy and Korie and a baleful lot of others. It had all happened in the very, very worst years of sickness and death, Clinton’s first term, overwhelming loss mingled confusingly with tidings of the coming respite.

Letters from home have come too, which I have not yet had the courage to read, I feel so melancholy. Please ask M. Aurier not to write any more articles on my painting, insist upon this, that to begin with he is mistaken about me, since I am too overwhelmed with grief to be able to face publicity. Making pictures distracts me, but if I hear them spoken of, it pains me more than he knows. How is Bernard? As there are some canvases in duplicate, if you like you can exchange with him, for a good canvas by him would be a fine thing to have in your collection. I felt ill at the time I was doing the almond blossoms. If I had been able to go on working, you can judge from it that I would have done others of trees in blossom. Now the trees in blossom are almost over, really I have no luck. Yes, I must try to get out of here, but where to go? I do not think I could be more shut up and more of a prisoner in the homes where they do not pretend to leave you free, such as at Charenton or Montevergues.

I gulped; I had the overwhelming sensation that what we had done wasn’t enough. I’m not sure what I had expected, maybe a fairy tale ending where a magic wand fixed everything, including all the darkness we had been through. But this was no fairy tale. Nothing could bring back the thirty boys that had died. Nothing could take away the grief that had torn their family’s hearts into shreds. Experiences like this, I realized, are wounds that never quite healed; they stayed with you and no amount of justice would erase the scar.

How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.

An Echo in the Bone. It was a familiar phenomenon. Doctors, soldiers, and mothers encounter it routinely; I had, any number of times. Unable to respond to an immediate emergency while clouded by fatigue, the mind simply withdraws a little, separating itself fastidiously from the body's overwhelming self-centered needs. From this clinical distance, it can direct things, bypassing emotions, pain, and tiredness, making necessary decisions, cold-bloodedly overruling the mindless body's needs for food, water, sleep, love, grief, pushing it past its fail-safe points. Why emotions? I wondered dimly. Surely emotion was a function of the mind. And yet it seemed so deeply rooted in the flesh and this abdication of the mind always suppressed emotion, too. They body resents this abdication, I think. Ignored and abused, it will not easily let the mind return. Often, the separation persists until one if finally allowed to sleep. With the body absorbed in its quiet intensities of regeneration, the mind settles cautiously back into the turbulent flesh, feeling its delicate way through the twisting passages of dreams, making peace. And you wake once more whole.

The pain of heartache often comes in unpredictable episodes of intense pain that come and go. These episodes are called grief “spasms”—you feel overwhelmed by your sense of sorrow. You may hurt physically and feel like you have the flu. Consumed by your own pain and situation,you feel disconnected to everyone else and life takes on a surreal, hazy quality. Stumbling through each day, you feel taxed by the most mundane tasks. All you can think about is how much you hurt. The intensity of your feelings may frighten you, but this is normal. You’re not losing control; you’re not going crazy. You are grieving.

When I lived in New York and went to Chinatown, I learned that these flavors and their meanings were actually a foundation of ancient Chinese medicine. Salty translated to fear and the frantic energy that tries to compensate for or hide it. Sweet was the first flavor we recognized from our mother's milk, and to which we turned when we were worried and unsure or depressed. Sour usually meant anger and frustration. Bitter signified matters of the heart, from simply feeling unloved to the almost overwhelming loss of a great love. Most spices, along with coffee and chocolate, had some bitterness in their flavor profile. Even sugar, when it cooked too long, turned bitter. But to me, spice was for grief, because it lingered longest.

The smell of flowers was overwhelming, and it reminded me of walking into a flower shop to pick the perfect bouquet when my gran died. It wasn’t a good memory, and the smell was intoxicating. My heart broke while looking at the beautiful variations of flowers and smelling the sweet nectar. It was a terrible mix. The beauty, the nature, the colors, and the smell—all laced with grief. And what I could never comprehend was that flowers were for every occasion. You get them when you’re in love and when it’s your birthday; you can get them with a new job or a raise. And how is it supposed to make you feel when all you can remember is the smell of heartbreak, and it takes you back to that space in time? It doesn’t feel like a celebration of anything, but more like torture. Torture of the mind and soul.

I’ve often wished—especially when I was younger—that my work was better, that it rose to the level of genius, that I could write well enough to make something worth remembering. But I think that way of imagining art might make individuals too important. Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can. In time, it gets painted over. The ball gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your paint. And eventually, maybe nobody knows about it except for you. But that doesn’t mean your layer of paint is irrelevant or a failure. You have permanently, if slightly, changed the larger sphere. You’ve made it more beautiful, and more interesting. The world’s largest ball of paint looks nothing like the baseball it used to be, and you’re part of the reason. In the end, that’s what art is for me. You paint the ball, which changes the way someone else thinks about painting the ball, and so on, until some guy overwhelmed with grief and dread drives out to Alexandria, Indiana, to see what beautiful foolishness thousands of people have made together, and feels a hope that cannot be explained or shared except by painting. That guy adds a layer of his own to the ball, one that won’t last but still matters. Art is not only a genius going forth, as James Joyce put it, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway. I give the world’s largest ball of paint four stars.

Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time. Any form will do—writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance, or something else—as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion. (See the resources at the end of this book for more on developing the practice of compassion.)

The area around the fifty-yard line had been set up with a stage and seating. The kids held my hands as we went to the elevator, ready to go out. "Can you believe we're in Cowboys Stadium for Daddy?" I asked them, trying to rally my spirits as well as theirs. "He would be so blown away." I think they nodded. The elevator opened. We got in. The car went down, and suddenly we were walking onto the runway that led to the field. Pay attention to what’s around you. This is unbelievable! The bagpipers began to move, the tap of their shoes on the concrete apron echoing loudly. The cadence centered me. The pipes began to mourn and my spirit swelled, the music propelling me forward. The casket was marched out and placed front and center. The pallbearers and Navy honor guard stood at attention. I was moving in a cocoon of numbing grief and overwhelming awe. There was a prayer, speeches--each moment moved me in a different way. The easy jokes, the devotional hymns, each had its own effect. I began to float. When I’d asked people to talk about Chris at the ceremony, I’d made a point of reminding them of his humor and asking if possible to add some lighter touches to their speeches, roasting him, even; it was all so Chris. But now some of the light jokes tripped a wire: Don’t talk bad about him! Don’t you dare! Then in the next moment I’d realize he would have been leading the laughs, and it was all good again. I couldn’t force a smile, though.

What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can’t contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It’s what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack—I mourned—but not in a personal way—it was a cosmic mourning—something that I could not specify because I didn’t know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger—estranged in myself and confused—I saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks—what a theater of the unexpected—my mother would have cried—there were only black curtains, black drapes—showing the mourning of the stores—no mannequins, just veils—black veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later—none of them had blond hair. I don’t know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond—targets of terrorists. Even they didn’t want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him—dye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.

expected that it would go on to have such a long and varied life. I started with a very simple image of two boys sitting on either side of a fence, talking to each other, and was immediately interested in the journey that would bring them there, the conversations they would have, and the necessary end that I felt their story would reach. Ten years later, the novel not only changed my life but introduced me to people whom I had never expected to encounter. In my travels, I’ve been fortunate to meet survivors of the many death camps that were built around Europe during the early 1940s and to hear their stories firsthand, as well as descendants of the murdered, who have been generous enough to share their memories and grief with me. It’s been a privilege to be present for such moments and to take part in such emotive conversations. There are two things that interest me above all others in young people’s literature, and I’ve returned to them several times in subsequent books: the manner in which war affects and destroys the experience of childhood, which is supposed to be a happy and carefree period, and what it means for a child to be thrust into an adult situation far ahead of time. The heroes of my novels are, like Bruno, always optimistic, resourceful, and a little naïve, and they don’t want an adult to solve their problems for them, even when they’re not always capable of solving them themselves. They’re growing up surrounded by confusion and trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes the chaos overwhelms them. But they’re never defeated. I will always be grateful to those millions of readers who allowed The Boy in the Striped Pajamas into their lives, those who have been moved by the story and, indeed, those who have taken issue with aspects of it and been vocal in their antipathy. After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closest friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed. Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction

As the year went on, I felt I was handling my grief and depression better, but the pressures kept piling up. You don’t really ever feel “comfortable” being a widow. You endure, maybe get through it, but you don’t ever truly own it. And still, a part of me didn’t want to get beyond it. My pain was proof of my love. One night I went over to a friend’s house and just started bawling. I had been going through photos of Chris when he was in his twenties and thirties. I’m going to be an old woman somewhere, and he’s going to be young. So many other emotions ran through me every day. People suggested that I might find someone else. “No,” I’d tell them. “No one will ever take his place.” School forms would ask about the kids’ family situation. Were their parents married, divorced? I’m not a single mother. I’m raising the kids with my husband! Even if he’s not here. I always think about what he would want to do. One night, alone in my bedroom, I picked up the laundry basket off the treadmill. I suddenly felt as if Chris was there with me, somehow hovering two feet off the ground. He grinned. “I’m working on something for you,” he said. And I knew he meant he was trying to hook me up with a man. I jerked back. Had I really heard that? Was he really there? The room was empty, but I had the strongest feeling that he was there. I could feel his grin. I became furious. “How dare you!” I screamed in my head. “I don’t want anyone else. I want you! What’s wrong with you?” I walked out of the room. I blocked him out for a while, partly because of that incident, partly because of how overwhelming the emotions were. Finally I realized I didn’t want to do that. And one night toward the end of the year, I said aloud, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to block you out.” The room was empty, but I sensed he might be with me. “I am so sorry!” I repeated. Then I started bawling. I felt as if he came over and put his arm around my waist. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. His voice, in a whisper, but one I felt rather than heard: I didn’t want to hurt you. I cried and cried. I felt a million things--sorry, crazy, insane. I finally glanced up and looked in the mirror. I was alone. “I’m not losing it,” I told myself. “What little I have left, I’m not losing it.” I slumped off to bed, exhausted.

They'd followed him up and had seen him open the door of a room not far from the head of the stairs. He hadn't so much as glanced their way but had gone in and shut the door. She'd walked on with Martha, past that door, down the corridor and around a corner to their chamber. Drawing in a tight-faintly excited-breath, she set out, quietly creeping back to the corner, her evening slippers allowing her to tiptoe along with barely a sound. Nearing the corner, she paused and glanced back along the corridor. Still empty. Reassured, she started to turn, intending to peek around the corner- A hard body swung around the corner and plowed into her. She stumbled back. Hard hands grabbed her, holding her upright. Her heart leapt to her throat. She looked up,saw only darkness. She opened her mouth- A palm slapped over her lips. A steely arm locked around her-locked her against a large, adamantine male body; she couldn't even squirm. Her senses scrambled. Strength, male heat, muscled hardness engulfed her. Then a virulent curse singed her ears. And she realized who'd captured her. Panic and sheer fright had tensed her every muscle; relief washed both away and she felt limp. The temptation to sag in his arms, to sink gratefully against him, was so nearly overwhelming that it shocked her into tensing again. He lowered his head so he could look into her face. Through clenched teeth, he hissed, "What the hell are you doing?" His tone very effectively dragged her wits to the fore. He hadn't removed his hand from her lips. She nipped it. With a muted oath, he pulled the hand away. She moistened her lips and angrily whispered back, "Coming to see you, of course. What are you doing here?" "Coming to fetch you-of course." "You ridiculous man." Her hands had come to rest on his chest. She snatched them back, waved them. "I'm hardly likely to come to grief over the space of a few yards!" Even to her ears they sounded like squabbling children. He didn't reply. Through the dark, he looked at her. She couldn't see his eyes, but his gaze was so intent, so intense that she could feel... her heart started thudding, beating heavier, deeper. Her senses expanded, alert in a wholly unfamiliar way. he looked at her...looked at her. Primitive instinct riffled the delicate hairs at her nape. Abruptly he raised his head, straightened, stepped back. "Come on." Grabbing her elbow, he bundled her unceremoniously around the corner and on up the corridor before him. Her temper-always close to the surface when he was near-started to simmer. If they hadn't needed to be quiet, she would have told him what she thought of such cavalier treatment. Breckenridge halted her outside the door to his bedchamber; he would have preferred any other meeting place, but there was no safer place, and regardless of all and everything else, he needed to keep her safe. Reaching around her, he raised the latch and set the door swinging. "In here." He'd left the lamp burning low. As he followed her in, then reached back and shut the door, he took in what she was wearing. He bit back another curse. She glanced around, but there was nowhere to sit but on the bed. Quickly he strode past her, stripped off the coverlet, then autocratically pointed at the sheet. "Sit there." With a narrow-eyed glare, she did, with the haughty grace of a reigning monarch. Immediately she'd sat, he flicked out the coverlet and swathed her in it. She cast him a faintly puzzled glance but obligingly held the enveloping drape close about her. He said nothing; if she wanted to think he was concerned about her catching a chill, so be it. At least the coverlet was long enough to screen her distracting angles and calves. Which really was ridiculous. Considering how many naked women he'd seen in his life, why the sight of her stockinged ankles and calves should so affect him was beyond his ability to explain.