Top 100 Quotes About Child Loss
#1. Child loss is not an event, it's an indescribable journey of survival
Unknown
#2. Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.
Lynda Cheldelin Fell
#3. There was no way possible that I was going to have a life and not live it.
JohnA Passaro
#4. The loss of a child exploits the emotions of each individual it encounters.
Asa Don Brown
#5. Her mother's quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline's despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live.
Pamela Erens
#6. That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?
Maurice Sendak
#8. Laws on killing, even God's demands, didn't allow for peace. Not always. There'd still be pain; missing that child would break her parents' hearts. But what Helen knew, what she'd seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody.
Alan Heathcock
#10. Whichever way I went, there would be sadness and a sense of loss. Was this a part of growing up - the agony of making such choices?
If so, I wanted to stay a child forever.
- Ian Carras
Bill Brittain
#11. The process of grieving any loss is dependent upon your relationship to the person.
Asa Don Brown
#12. Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.
Nicole Kidman
#13. What it has meant to stay alive when my daughter did not. What it has meant to suffer a heartbeat after carrying the weight and form of her inside my body, wedged just beneath that fist-shaped muscle.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#14. As an individual, you are entitled to your time of grief, process of grief, and right to grieve.
Asa Don Brown
#15. From a child I was taught to forgive and forget, but it's difficult to forget these things, the loss of parents, of children and grandchildren.
Ann Leckie
#16. He knew exactly what it was like to lose a child. And that fact wouldn't matter in the least in this circumstance. There could be no commiseration among such people despite the seeming commonality of loss, because it was actually each parent's totally unique hell.
David Baldacci
#17. There are words like 'orphan', 'widow' and 'widower' in all languages. But there is no word in any language to describe a parent who loses a child. How does one describe the pain of 'ultimate bereavement'! (Page 50)
Neena Verma
#18. I'm tired of everyone looking at me with pity in their eyes. I'm tired of feeling like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every damned day. I'm tired of waking up in the morning, and then remembering ...
A.B. Shepherd
#20. Every day we do get closer to a cure. Three out of four children who are diagnosed with cancer will survive the disease, but that is not good enough. The loss of one child to this disease is too much.
Michael McCaul
#21. There was no true recovery from the loss of a child. A part of her was broken and it couldn't be fixed.
Debra Webb
#22. We do not have control
over many things
in life and death
but we do have control
over the meaning we give it.
Nathalie Himmelrich
#23. Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.
Judith Lewis Herman
#24. I saw something I could never forget. I saw lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and understanding in a child's eye. It was the worst thing I would ever witness.
Shannon A. Thompson
#25. Our own system of trying to guess what or how much a child's mind can assimilate results in cross purposes, misunderstanding, disappointments, anger and a general loss of harmony.
Jean Liedloff
#26. Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.
Asa Don Brown
#27. It is time to teach society on how to be empathetic with people grieving.
Nathalie Himmelrich
#28. She was too young to truly understand our loss, and she was too old to hold in my arms. Yet, I wanted nothing more than to clutch her against me as we faced the burial of her mother.
Cheryl R Cowtan
#29. Making a film is like raising a child. You have to be there every step of the way, guide it, provide for it, and finally let it go into the real world and hope you have done a good job. If you don't absolutely love your film then you will loss interest in it and the movie will suffer.
Nicholas Ozeki
#30. There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief ... is the weight of a sleeping child.
Anne Michaels
#33. There's nothing that symbolizes loss or grief more than a mother losing a child.
David LaChapelle
#35. Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Mark Twain
#36. If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead ... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.
Ann Hood
#37. Mothering while grieving should involve being understanding and keeping a gentle attitude toward yourself as you work to balance your own needs and your child's. You become stronger by remaining aware of your own well-being, which in turn makes you a stronger person for your child or children.
Elizabeth Berrien
#38. That's my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn't like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better.
Paula Hawkins
#39. You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You'll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you.
Charles Lee
#40. Standing on the edge with my patients - abiding with them - means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.
Christine Montross
#41. Facebook may not only propagate cyber-loneliness but exacerbate the pain of loss that estranged family members feel when they hear only indirectly, through a third-party posting, news of a child or parent with whom they have not spoken in years.
Eugene Kennedy
#42. One of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.
Audrey Niffenegger
#44. There are few experiences in life as painful and brutal as the failure of a small business. For a small business conceived and nurtured by its owner is like a living, breathing child. Its loss is no less traumatic than losing a loved one.
William Manchee
#45. To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a set of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.
Jodi Picoult
#46. In the context of loss, each child is an only to her or his parents. Human relationships do not fill in for, do not substitute for, do not replace each other.
Marcia Falk
#47. Don't cry. She wouldn't like it. When I missed my father, I used to cry. Mama taught me when I cry, he is sad and will cry, too. I don't want my daddy sad. I'm sure you don't want your daughter sad, too.
Cristiane Serruya
#48. When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss.
Margaret Mahy
#49. Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she'd been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing.
Maryanne O'Hara
#50. If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#51. The process of grief and loss is as unique as your personal DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid); no two individuals will have the same experiences or relationship to grief.
Asa Don Brown
#52. Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B.Yeats
#53. Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share
and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.
Judith Viorst
#54. Blaming the woman for the loss of a child is like blaming the soldier for the loss of his life in battle.
Katherine Longshore
#55. You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.
Alison Bruce
#56. I always loved horror, but I read all sorts of books. My favourite as a child was 'The Secret Garden' which has a big influence on Lord Loss, believe it or not!
Darren Shan
#57. But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.
-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
Ariel Levy
#58. I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you?
Dan Chaon
#59. 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
#60. And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I
Richard Ford
#61. I tell you of my loss, child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours.
Thanhha Lai
#62. A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.
Richard Louv
#63. Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#64. Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#65. Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost!
Deborah Sampson
#66. As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever.
Erin Gray
#67. The loss of a child is the most terrifying place for me to go.
Nicole Kidman
#68. Loss is a peculiar thing. It drives creativity, and it fuels the dark emotions that inspire a designer or writer or musician to bring forth a creative child whole-cloth. It is loss that compels creativity.
R.B. Chesterton
#69. I do not believe the loss of a child is something one ever overcomes. One puts on the faces one needs, but inside, one bleeds and bleeds.
Elizabeth Berg
#70. Sometimes it's hard to see the rainbow when there's been endless days of rain.
Christina Greer
#71. The beat of her heart, the slow burning away ... of the bitter fires of the devil's arcade.
Bruce Springsteen
#72. I loved them too and while you might lay a greater claim to them, I defy you to miss your wife any more than I'll miss my best friend or your child, who was every inch a son to me.
Fiona McIntosh
#73. As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn't here. Before that, my parents weren't here. And before that ...
John Burnside
#74. This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.
Ann Hood
#75. I've never lost a grown-up child, but I have known loss.
Penelope Wilton
#76. Vianne knew Rachel wasn't asking how to hide in the barn; she was asking how to live after a loss like this, how to pick up one child and let the other go, how to keep breathing after you whisper "good-bye." "I can't leave her.
Kristin Hannah
#77. All over now. He is either in joy or nothingness.
(So why grieve?
The worst of it, for him, is over.)
Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing.
George Saunders
#78. I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving.
Andrew Solomon
#79. I've come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.
Is it my fault.
What happened to you.
Are you happy.
What do you want from me.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#80. I'm so damn tired of you blaming me for that accident. It happened. Could have been you instead of me. It could have happened to anyone. It just so happen that it happened to us.
Francois Houle
#82. There's just no love like the love of a mother for a child, no matter how that child comes into their life, and no loss or grief to match it.
Nora Roberts
#83. If we can prevent just one marriage from disintegrating--or just one child from suffering the loss of a family--our effort will be justified.
James C. Dobson
#84. I'm doubly sorry for your loss," the old monk began after a time. "First, because every son should have a chance to know his father, not as a child knows his protector, but as a man knows another man.
Brian Staveley
#85. The world grows smaller,' she finally said. 'And small worlds cultivate greed. It is a grievous sin... We are not all like them. I am sorry, child, for your loss, and I am sorry for them, for seeing such a small world.
Marie Lu
#86. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-
great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#87. A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That's how awful the loss is.
Jay Neugeboren
#88. In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.
Jodi Picoult
#89. Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.
Dennis Prager
#90. What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.
Paul Harding
#91. Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.
Anthony Horowitz
#92. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.
Cormac McCarthy
#93. It was a phone call she didn't want to make. She didn't want to hurt him. Whatever words she gave him, it would take being a daddy away from him.
Crissi Langwell
#94. Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.
Louise Penny
#95. One can't run in a park without a dog or make angels in the snow without a child and there are things one can't do without a lover, so the loss of the lover is like an amputation and the patient goes into shock.
Merle Shain
#97. I know what it's like to lose kits, Oakheart, I wouldn't wish that kind of grief on any cat.
Erin Hunter
#98. I am not a broken heart.
I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn't know how to handle anything,
at any time,
and I am not your fault.
Charlotte Eriksson
#99. Then, as a child does, she grew to accept the first great absence in her life, a weaning from the sure certainty that all children are born with - that it was no country where loss could come their way, that nothing would ever change in that place called home.
Kalyan Ray
#100. Better to scratch the wound than bandage it: those who lose a child shouldn't be consoled; parents die to make room for their kids, not the other way around. He wasn't being cruel, he just thought a gash that deep had to be respected, not swaddled over with cuddles.
Yuri Herrera
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