Death Of A Child Quotes

“...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.”
― Rob Liano

“But I guess death is like that. It takes away from you in an instant the people you've cherished for a whole lifetime. Just like that. As simple as that. And you are suddenly left with two things: anger for having been deprived of your beloved for no reason at all; and emptiness, a vacuum that gnaws right at your heart where all the joyful moments once had been.”
― Jocelyn Soriano, In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One

“Do not weep for those who have found Death's embrace early, for they weep for us that linger on in this mortal world of pain.”
― Stewart Stafford

“His death brings new experience to my life - that of a wound that will not heal.”
― Ernst Jünger, A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945

“For no soul can ever be replaced, and death claims a beauty and a magnificence that will always be missed.”
― Jocelyn Soriano, In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One

“Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story--a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we'd wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, "I can't imagine how you felt, what that was like." I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, "Like being burned alive.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“I wait and pray and hope
I will look forward to each brand new day
thankful for all that I've had and will always have
thankful for the sun that shines again
believing and hanging on
believing that life will go on
it can't help but go on
it shall go on
and in so going
there really is no end
only mornings and evenings
and life that never ever ends.”
― Jocelyn Soriano, In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One

“I cannot tell you how often I have counseled a grieving woman about a miscarriage or an abortion from years before. There were so many reasons why it was not practical or reasonable to have a child, so on a rational level there was often an understanding and acceptance. However, this did not relieve the pain and guilt of losing a child. In trance states we would often go looking for that soul. What a surprise for many when they discovered that this soul came back as a niece, nephew or even a younger child of their own.”
― Stephen Poplin, Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook

“We have known what it is to have had a gift, and have not ever questioned from where the gift came, only sometimes wondered. The gift has not been taken away because gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still.”
― Patricia Grace, Potiki

“The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“She wondered how to mourn the death of a son who wasn't dead. And yet the loss of separation made that easy. The idea of pain made pain, where she knew none could possibly truly exist.”
― Juliet Castle, The Silent Partner And Other Stories Of Truth

“One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood," writes Kathleen Norris, "is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die."

I am not so brave. Far more frightening to me than the threat of interrupted plans or endless to-do lists is the thread of loving someone as intensely as a mother loves her child. To invite in to the universe a new life, knowing full well that no one can protect thatl ife from the currents of evil that pulse through our world and through our very bloodstreams, seems a grave and awesome task that is at once unspeakably selfish and miraculously good. I am frightened enough by how fervently I love Dan, by my absolute revolt against the possibility -- no, the inevitable reality -- that he will get hurt, that he will experience loss, and that one day he will die. I'm not sure my heart is big enough to wrap itself around another breakable soul.

I was once waiting in an airport next to a woman whose six-year-old daughter suffered from a rare heart defect that could take her life at any moment. In spite of mounting medical bills and the pressures of raising both a child with special needs and another younger daughter, the woman said she and her husband planned to adopt a boy from Ethiopia later that year.

"What made you want to grow your family in the midst of all this turmoil?" I asked.

"Why did the Jews have children after the Holocaust?" she asked back. "Why do women keep trying after multiple miscarraiges? It's our way of shaking our fists at the future and saying, you know what?--we will be hopeful; things will get better; you can't scare us after all. Having children is, ultimately, an act of faith.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“Der Gast

Das Kind ist krank zum Sterben,
Die Lampe giebt trägen Schein,
Die Mutter spricht: mir ist es
Als wären wir nicht allein.

Der Vater sucht zu lächeln,
Doch im Herzen pocht's ihm bang,
Stiller wird's und stiller, -
Die Nacht ist gar zu lang.

Nun scheint der Tag ins Fenster,
Die Vögel singen so klar;
Die Beiden wußten lange,
Wer der Gast gewesen war.”
― Theodor Fontane

“How does it feel, to see a dying child? One does not feel at all for there is nothing in the mind to make sense of it. Nothing, but one's own death.”
― A.J.West, The Spirit Engineer

“As children, we look to adults to be perfect and say the right thing. Mama Taaq, face streaked grey from dust and tears, should have replied to her shivering, shuddering child: “You did everything right, my darling. You did everything you could and none of this is your fault.
Later she would say those words, but later was too late, because that night all she did was cry and turn away from her still-living daughter to try and find her dead one. These things are entirely natural and understandable – just not to a child.”
― Claire North, Notes from the Burning Age

“You can be too old to live, but not too young to die.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“you never know what your capable of withstanding, till shit happens”
― Denise

“I have heard that the sight of the dead has confirmed materialists in their belief. I ever felt otherwise. Was that my child—that moveless decaying inanimation? My child was enraptured by my caresses; his dear voice cloathed with meaning articulations his thoughts, otherwise inaccessible; his smile was a ray of the soul, and the same soul sat upon its throne in his eyes. I turn from this mockery of what he was.”
― Mary Shelley (Author)

“Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy”
― Ben Jonson

“God doesn't promise a promise an easy journey, just a safe place to land”
― Kirk Spencer, A Gift...Only Borrowed

“God doesn't promise an easy journey, just a safe place to land”
― Kirk Spencer, A Gift...Only Borrowed

“On this day
innocence was drowned in water,
and puberty terminated
by the blade of the guillotine.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Kyllä se menee ohi, aika parantaa haavat, suru muuttaa muotoaan, nyt lapsesi on paremmassa paikassa, nyt hänen on hyvä olla. Näilä sanoilla minua on yritetty lohduttaa.

Eivät ne lohduta.

Eiväthän ne ole totta.

Menetykseni ei mene ohi. Aika ei paranna haavoja. Suru ei lopu. Se on kroonistunut. Se jättää aivoihin pysyvän molekyylijäljen. Lapseni on lakannut olemasta, eikä sitä tyhjiötä voi täyttää tai korvata millään muulla. Häntä ei enää ole. Hän ei ole missään paremmassa paikassa, ei hänen ole nyt hyvä olla.

Häntä ei enää ole.”
― Katriina Huttunen, Surun istukka

“Some of us meet our death while we are being introduced to life by our birth.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Listen, the bass lisper intoned. At the time Marie and I did away with that baby, we felt ourselves to be working in the service of good. Honestly! We loved one another; the baby was not quite right; was an impediment to our love; its (his) stunted development impeded the natural expression of our love (we could not travel, could not dine out, were rarely given the slightest degree of privacy) and so it seemed (to us, at that time) that to remove the negative influence that was that baby (by dropping him into Furniss Creek) would free us up; to be more loving, and be more fully in the world, and would relieve him of the suffering entailed in being forevermore not quite right; would, that is, free him up from his suffering as well, and maximize the total happiness.

- It seemed that way to you, the Brit said.

- It did, it truly did, the bass lisper said.

- Does it seem that way to you now? the woman asked.

- Less so, the bass lisper said sadly.

- Then your punishment is having the desired effect, the woman said.”
― George Sanders

“I mourned, hands clenched, before that mound.
For the piercing cold of grief had caught
Me in the doleful dread and bound
My heart, though reason solace sought.
I longed for my pearl, locked in the ground,
While fierce contentions in me fought.
In Christ, though comfort could be found.
My wretched will was still distraught.
I fell upon that flowery plot.”
― Anonymous

“Each grass from a lifeless grain is bred,
Else to harvest no wheat were won:
Always from good is good begun.
So seemly a seed could not die in vain,
That sprig nor spice there would be none
Of that precious pearl without a stain.”
― Anonymous

“Epitaph

'On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred'



What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain,
What one moment calls again.
Seven years childless marriage past,
A Son, a son is born at last:
So exactly lim’d and fair,
Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air,
As a long life promised,
Yet, in less than six weeks dead.
Too promising, too great a mind
In so small room to be confined:
Therefore, as fit in Heaven to dwell,
He quickly broke the Prison shell.
So the subtle Alchemist,
Can’t with Hermes Seal resist
The powerful spirit’s subtler flight,
But t’will bid him long good night.
And so the Sun if it arise
Half so glorious as his Eyes,
Like this Infant, takes a shrowd,
Buried in a morning Cloud.”
― Katherine Philips