23 Quotes about Grief for Those in Need of Comfort

Find comfort in these quotes about grief—words of wisdom to help navigate loss and remind you that you are not alone.

Grief is a journey no one wants to take, yet it is an inevitable part of life. In the wake of her first-born son’s death, author Melissa Dalton-Bradford searched for words that could help her make sense of the pain. She found solace in the wisdom of others—voices from across history that spoke to the heart of loss—and compiled them in On Loss and Living Onward: Collected Voices for the Grieving and Those Who Would Mourn with Them. This book serves as a guide through sorrow, offering comfort, understanding, and hope. The quotes about grief in this article are drawn from her collection, each one a reminder that even in the depths of loss, we are not alone.

1.

The original meaning of succor is to run or dash to someone’s aid. How soon we go, how easily we drop everything to help, says something about our esteem for the person in need. Zeal sends one message; hesitation another. The best time and most eloquent way to succor is to do so when need arises. After all, service is seldom convenient.

—Wayne E. Brickey, Making Sense of Suffering

2.

To show compassion means to share in the suffering “passion” of another. Compassion understood in this way asks more from us than a mere stirring of pity or a sympathetic word.

To live with compassion means to enter others’ dark moments. It is to walk into places of pain, not to flinch or look away when another agonizes. It means to stay where people suffer. Compassion holds us back from quick, eager explanations when tragedy meets someone we know or love.

—Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning Into Dancing

3.

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

—Sophocles, quoted in To My Soul Mate

4.

Can I see another’s woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another’s grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrow’s share?

Can a father see his child

Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear

An infant groan, an infant fear?

No, no! never can it be!

Never, never can it be!

And can He who smiles on all

Hear the wren with sorrows small,

Hear the small bird’s grief and care,

Hear the woes that infants bear—

And not sit beside the nest,

Pouring pity in their breast,

And not sit the cradle near,

Weeping tear on infant’s tear?

And not sit both night and day,

Wiping all our tears away?

Oh no! never can it be!

Never, never can it be!

He doth give His joy to all:

He becomes an infant small,

He becomes a man of woe,

He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,

And thy Maker is not by:

Think not thou canst weep a tear,

And thy Maker is not near.

Oh, He gives to us His joy,

That our grief He may destroy:

Till our grief is fled and gone

He doth sit by us and moan.

—William Blake, “On Another’s Sorrow,” The Poetical Works of William Blake

5.

A physician who lost one of his own children says that before his loss, when he would hear of a child’s death, he would send a card; now he sends himself.

—Joyce and Dennis Ashton, Jesus Wept

6.

One compassionate gaze or one affectionate handshake can substitute for years of friendship when a person is in agony. Not only does love last forever, it need only a second to be born.

—Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

7.

No man is an island, entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . . any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

—John Donne, “Meditation XVII”

8.

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.

—Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

9.

It is natural, in sorrow, to be consoled if a friend shares our grief. . . .

First, sorrow weighs one down; it is a load which, of course, one tries to lighten. When therefore a person sees others joining him in sorrow, it feels as if they are helping him carry the load, trying to lessen its weight on him; so the burden weighs on him less heavily, just as in the case of carrying physical weights.

—St. Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Consoling Grace

10.

What is the difference between grieving and mourning? Mourning has company.

—Roger Rosenblatt, Kayak Morning

11.

The suffering of the world has worked its way deeper inside me. I never knew that sorrow could be like this. Six months before, I had gone to the funeral of the twenty-three-year-old son of friends. I tried to imagine the quality of their grief. I know now that I failed miserably.

—Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

12.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

—Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World

13.

Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Say Hello

14.

A simplistic sounding answer to the question of how to help families face tragedy is that, paradoxically, there are no “right things to say,” nor is there even a need to say anything that speaks of the intellect at a time like this. The need is for sincere human love, reaching in its own unique, spontaneous, fumbling way with a “built-in” message: “Though I don’t fully understand how you feel, I care enough to come to you and to try to share your hurt with you as much as I can, and as much as you will allow me to at this time. I’ll leave you alone if I get any vibrations from you that you prefer to be alone, yet I’ll leave with a readiness to come back when you give the signal you want me to come back.”

—Vern Albrecht, quoted in Grieving: The Pain and the Promise

15.

The reality of grief is the absence of God—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The reality of grief is the solitude of pain, the feeling that your heart’s in pieces, your mind’s a blank, that “there is no joy the world can give like that it takes away” [Lord Byron]. . . .

That’s why immediately after such tragedy people must come to your rescue, people who only want to hold your hand, not to quote anybody or even say anything, people who simply bring food and flowers—the basics of beauty and life—people who sign letters simply, “Your brokenhearted sister.” In other words, in my intense grief I felt some of my fellow reverends—not many, and none of you, thank God—were using comforting words of Scripture for self-protection, to pretty up a situation whose bleakness they simply couldn’t face. But like God . . . Scripture is not around for anyone’s protection, just for everyone’s unending support.

And that’s what [you] understood so beautifully. You gave me what God gives all of us—minimum protection, maximum support. I swear to you, I wouldn’t be standing here were I not upheld.

—William Sloane Coffin Jr., quoted in This Incomplete One

16.

May I try to tell you again where your only comfort lies? It is not in forgetting the happy past. People bring us well-meant but miserable consolations when they tell us what time will do to help our grief. We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

—Phillips Brooks, quoted in A Broken Heart Still Beats

17.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim!

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay

18.

One does nothing who tries to console a despondent person with word. A friend is one who aids with deeds at a critical time when deeds are called for.

—Titus Maccius Plautus

19.

What do you say to someone who is suffering?

Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us. But not all are gifted that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken. And if you can’t think of anything at all to say, just say, “I can’t think of anything to say. But I want you to know what we are with you in your grief.” Or even, just embrace. Not even the best of words can take away the pain. What words can do is testify that there is more than pain in our journey on earth to a new day. Of those things that are more, the greatest is love. Express your love. How appallingly grim must be death of a child in the absence of love.

But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.

—Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

20.

Attempting to console those who have lost loved ones . . . by saying it will be better in the next life tends to minimize their immediate pain: “It’s like you’re on a desert island and you are dying of thirst, and someone says, ‘Yes, you can have a drink, but not for thirty years!’”

—Joyce and Dennis Ashton, Jesus Wept

21.

We need people who most sensitively mediate God’s love for us.

—Wayne Simsic, Cries of the Heart

22.

[Y]ou are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don’t think, don’t feel, any more than you can help, don’t conclude or decide—don’t do anything but wait. Everything will pass, and serenity and accepted mysteries and disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain. You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile . . . Try not to be ill—that is all; for in that there is a future. You are marked out for success, and you must not fail. You have my tenderest affection and all my confidence.

—Henry James, “Letter to Grace Norton,” Henry James: Selected Letters

23.

When our pain is so deep and real that we can’t see or feel anything else, we need the witness of the saints about us; saints who, on the basis of their own experience of life’s pain, can assure us that though our pain is true, it is not the ultimate truth. In all our pain, and beyond all our pain, always is the beauty, truth, and love of God in Jesus Christ, which never dies, and which will never allow us to die.

—Jeffery J. Newlin, “Standing at the Grave,” quoted in This Incomplete One

Standing on the Hinge

It doesn’t matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when your child’s footprints end at the river’s edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with bad news in her mouth . . . [y]our life will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction, and if you are wise . . . you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms. And if you are really wise, you will fall against it and be held.

—Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

Standing against the plaster wall in the old apartment in Widenmayerstrasse, a dark sweater drawn up to my jawline in spite of the August sun that reflected off the Isar river outside our window, and surrounded by stacks of moving boxes marked “Paris → Munich,” I stared at Randall. He was leaning heavily into the corner next to me, telephone receiver in hand. The conversation was with Mr. H., the assistant headmaster from our children’s school in Paris, the school from which Parker had graduated just two months earlier.

One month before his accident.

“You still there? Randall? Uh . . . Melissa?”

Listening to what I could make out from Randall’s receiver, my head tipped toward his, my arms wrapped firmly around my ribs, eyes closed for comfort and concentration, I could just make out what Mr. H. was saying.

Randall cleared his throat. “Here, yeah, yes. We’re both here.”

There was an unfamiliar vacancy to my husband’s voice, a hollow quality that, had you not known better, might have pointed to grave illness, a stroke, even Alzheimer’s. His trademark tip-of-toes vitality had vanished in one yank, and like a Christmas tree that has lost not only its sparkle but its very purpose the instant its string of lights is unplugged, so had Randall lost the high voltage that had always been his essence. I opened my eyes and looked at his face, aged two decades in less than one month. Have I lost him, too?

“Okay, well . . . are you and the kids . . . ” Mr. H.’s voice was a warm murmur, “are you going to make it?”

“We’re making it,” Randall offered, pacing around the quicksand of emotion. It was hard for him to open his mouth and make sounds without being swallowed up in the suction of despair. “But we’re not sure . . . we might need to move back to Paris. To our school. We need community. We need our people.”

“And we’re not finding it, them . . . yet,” I said, speaking in the direction of the phone, and just loudly enough for Mr. H. to hear.

Each passing day made our son’s absence more impossible to live with. I tried, unsuccessfully, to unpack boxes in this new place. I couldn’t look at pictures of him. His features—an unsuspecting smile, those blue-gray eyes alert and glinting, especially the toothless little boy, all heart-splitting—made me noiselessly wild, dizzy with pain.

Every day I vowed inwardly I would try to finish the unpacking. My limbs were full of concrete, and the thought of even picking up a box cutter made me ache with fatigue. Only five weeks ago—before I’d flown to the States to visit our firstborn at his initiatory week at college; before I’d received the policeman’s late-night phone call at my parents’ house; before that call that slashed open the skin of the universe, gushing reality in all directions; before in the Land of Before—I had been singing and dancing along with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” while bulldozing through the chaos of over three hundred just-delivered moving boxes. Rhythmically, confidently, I’d been ripping into this new life, into these boxes, the same way I’d torn into every one of our many international moves.

Now, as I propped my body against the chilly plaster, dense and inert as a big burlap bag of wet flour, Randall must have also wondered, Have I lost her, too?

“Hey, um, I’ve been working on an idea,” Mr. H. continued, with the faintest hint of fragility underneath his voice. Though he’d never struck me as a man who could crack, now I heard undeniable fissures creeping up the contours of his voice.

“See . . . this week alone I’ve had student after student in my office. Faculty, too. Every day, all day long, it seems. They’ve all needed to talk about . . . Parker.”

Speaking that name was like hitting a speed bump, and his voice stalled, before heaving itself over the hurdle.

“This is the idea,” Mr. H. went on. “I’ve been discussing doing a Parker Fairbourne Bradford Memorial at the school as soon as possible. End of this month, even. The more I talk with the administration about it, the more I see it might be a healthy thing, even a powerful thing. Good for us, for you, for Parker’s memory.”

“A memorial?” I mouthed the words to Randall, wondering if I’d heard correctly, and I started to feel heat kindle behind my ribs and through to my spine. Now I straightened, moved closer, and put my cheek against Randall’s so I could hear every word.

“People need to make sense of what’s happened, you know?” Mr. H’s voice was clearer. “Most found out through email and Facebook and texts over the summer. That went like wildfire. Lots of people have had to process it alone. Some were out of the loop and have just found out this week. Seems to me everyone needs a place to express their feelings and their love, to make sense. They really need to see you. They need to come together.”

Come together.

Those were the very words I had heard in my mind throughout the week preceding Parker’s funeral services. Come together right now, I had heard echoing inside my body as I sat with Randall and our three children looking out over the guests, an assemblage of the world sitting shoulder to shoulder. School friends, work colleagues, church friends, lifelong friends. Those who’d walked down the street. Those who’d flown across the ocean.

Come together. Right now. Over me.

Coming together had made for a funeral that wasn’t mere anodyne for our pain, or a distraction from bitter reality, but a fiery outpouring of purest, purifying love. For just a few hours, the rawest edges of our sorrow had felt blowtorched away, darkness had been blasted through with brilliant white, and our leaden hearts had been lifted on the surge of spirit.

Coming together over our boy happened again on an evening in September as our family sat on the front row of a packed school auditorium in Paris. Behind us sat youth and their parents as well as several of Randall’s work colleagues from all over Europe. To each side we saw many church and neighborhood friends. Faculty members and students closest to Parker spoke (tenderly, frankly, humorously, musically, poetically, mailed in from abroad, recited across the silence), and above the stage there hung a large screen with projections of pictures and video footage. Randall looked alive, radiant, and for two hours, at least, he was back on his toes. I got a blood transfusion with fire. My body shook like a furnace overstocked with coal, on the verge of exploding.

Coming together happened again when Parisian church friends John and Renée arranged a gathering in their apartment. I recall the moment the door opened and we crossed over their threshold into their care. It was like passing from gunmetal cold into goldenrod heat, and we sunk wordlessly into a circle of reaching arms and knowing eyes. Without hurry or agenda, we all whispered and wept until the sun set and then rose again on the city streets outside.

Coming together happened when a church leader in Paris called to ask if we could come “back home” and speak to those in our congregation who’d been shocked by the news of our tragedy. “Of course,” we answered, and did it enthusiastically, even though at the same moment in Munich we were hardly able to form the words to greet the local postman.

Were we really the same people? Hadn’t we been shivering and stiff in that dank prison cell in Widenmayerstrasse? Yet when we came together with those who loved us and our boy, we were flushed, fresh, and on our toes? Who can account for it? Where does that kind of transformation come from?

Love, if we risk turning in its direction and moving toward it, holds the power to pull our pain into its embrace, absorbing it, coaxing us toward healing. If we can lean out of our corners of isolation and our frosty walls of self-protection and “look around for love” as Braestrup suggests, we find that regular-body-temperature folks—nice, decent people, neighbors, professional colleagues, church brothers and sisters, teachers who pass in the hallways, friends of the friends of parents of students who sat next to someone’s child in a history class or in a jazz band or on the bench during basketball season—can stoke a saving fire in the ice-cold bones of the suffering.

And when that heat spreads through a whole community, it becomes a living firewall against the encroaching winter in everyone’s souls.

When sorrow pushes us to where a blue glacial wind threatens to plunge us off a cliff and into a crevasse of despair, part of our nature might stare blankly—drained, as it feels, of will—into that icy bottomlessness. Maybe for the length of one breath we stare. Maybe longer.

But there is another part of us, a wiser part, as Braestrup calls it, that will look around for love. It might only glance at first, eyelids low, fearing what it will or will not find. But in time, it will scavenge like a beast dying of hunger. It will yowl to the empty clouds and bray across the flat horizon for love. It will howl from the bottom of its lungs rendered rigid and brittle from cold. It will limp and then collapse and then belly-crawl for love.

And there, right there, love will be.

Right there, next to us, will be love holding out its everyday arms. Its stranger or next-door-neighbor or school administrator-made-brother arms.

Right there on the hinge we find it so that, instead of closing our eyes and waiting to die of the cold, we fall into the radiant reach of love. And we are held.

Discover More Quotes for Every Stage of Grief

^{Excerpt from On Loss and Living Onward by Melissa Dalton-Bradford.}