Tragedy Brings Us Together Quotes

I’ve read so many stories online about how tragedy brings people together, how hard times encourage bravery and sacrifice, how a crisis can turn ordinary folks into heroes. But what about the opposite, when something horrible happens and it strips us bare, exposing weaknesses we didn’t even know we had. What about when tragedy makes people worse?

It's not that we didn't love one another- we did. I just think we didn't know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren't prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we cold with what we had.

Hallie didn't believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving. We'd had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I'd wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I'd planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central American refugees. After that we'd have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic. I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government's blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left. Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.

Our love Many moments, many of them, Sometimes I look at her and often at them, Like these moments of time , everywhere she is, Here she is, there she is, wherever I maybe there she is, She lives in these moments of time, Sometimes walking unto me like the memories of time, No matter where I might be, She always finds me via these moments of time, and that is how she wants it to be, Her beauty lying seeded in moments of time, Until she herself becomes an inseparable part of time, Then she can anywhere be, To be my endless joy, For I shall then only behold her wherever I might see, And what a tragedy for the poor mirror it shall be, Casting my reflection, but in the mirror too only her, just her I see, Then what might become of life as it circles around her, Because by now time too has come to love her, Time is wherever she is, And I am wherever she is, Life waits longingly and for her time has no moments to spare, It has lent all its moments to her, that for life it was meant to spare, So her beauty grows and glows everyday, As time renews her every atom of beauty everyday, And as in this wonder of beauty she grows, My mind in her fondness grows, Today time has spent its entire reserve of moments, Now it has nothing left, no seconds, no minutes, no hours, no days, and no moments, So I hold her hand and bring her to the mirror, And together we stand before this well glazed mirror, And now it is the mirror, both of us in it, and time frozen forever, We continue to live in the mirror but time and everything else have lost their virtues forever, For when time gifted her spare moments, actually meant to renew life and its forms, It created a parallel universe of time, where her beauty and my love are the only life’s forms, And this is how it shall be my love, To love and live in these moments filled with the memories of our love.

About six months after the first time I did stand-up, Pete and I broke up. Two weeks after we broke up, 9/11 happened. I thought for sure this national tragedy would bring us back together like so many other couples, but he seemed to feel he could weather this global geopolitical shift with the new girl he was fucking.

They say tragedies like this bring people together. They’re right. And it’s suffocating.

As much as I love what I do and consider it worthwhile, I cannot escape the suspicion that what we do as mental health professionals is not as good as the healing that in other cultures has been rooted in the native soil of the returning soldier's community. Our culture has been notably deficient in providing for reception of the Furies of war into community. For better or for worse, the health care system has been given this role -- along with the prisons, where a disproportionate number of men incarcerated since the Vietnam War have been veterans. We must create our own new models of healing which emphasize communalization of the trauma. Combat veterans and American citizenry should meet together face to face in daylight, and listen, and watch, and weep, just as citizen-soldiers of ancient Athens did in the theater at the foot of the Acropolis. We need a modern equivalent of Athenian tragedy. Tragedy brings us to cherish our mortality, to savor and embrace it. Tragedy inclines us to prefer attachment to fragile mortals whom we love, like Odysseus return from war to his aging wife, Penelope, and to refuse promised immortality.