11 Healing Quotes About Grief to Soothe Your Heart and Spirit
Grief can make you feel as though you’re carrying the weight of the world.
Yet, in the midst of heartache, it’s often helpful to look to the words of those who have gone before—words that speak directly to our pain, offer us solace, and remind us that we are not alone in this journey.
In this blog, I’ve gathered 11 powerful quotes about grief and healing from my second book, Your Grief, Your Way, a nonreligious daily devotional for those navigating the death of a loved one. These are quotes from philosophers, celebrities, writers, and historical figures whose words about loss made me feel like someone else knew what I was going through. I hope they’re helpful to you too.
Each quote has been chosen to speak to a different aspect of grief, offering hope, validation, and encouragement no matter who you’re grieving or how long it’s been since your loss.
Let’s dive into these transformative words, grouped by who they might best help.
1. If Your Heart is Hurting
“Grief is never something you get over. You don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I’ve conquered that; now I’m moving on.’ It’s something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity.” — Terri Irwin
I remind my clients over and over again that there is no definitive fix for grief. This may sound pessimistic or hopeless, but when you give up the hope that grief is meant to be solved, you embrace the reality that grief is meant to be experienced. In releasing the pressure to solve grief, you give yourself permission to experience it, including all its ups and downs.
2. If You’re Missing Them
“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” — Anne Lamott
Healing from grief is very similar to healing from a broken leg. You are never exactly the same as you were before, and your life after must be modified to accommodate the limp. Life after loss is not an impossible one to live, but your activities, and your mindset, must shift to account for the new presence of grief. With time, focus, and self-forgiving practice, you can learn to dance with a limp—whatever “dancing” looks like to you.
3. If You’re Feeling Lost
“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
It’s tempting to leap forward into the future and try to imagine what the Entire Rest of Your Life™ will look like now that loss has occurred. Other people have made it out alive; why shouldn’t you? And exactly how are you going to get there? Take a deep breath and know that it’s okay that you don’t have all the answers right now. You don’t even have to know the how; you just have to know the that—that one day you will be somewhere different (and probably better!) than the forest of sorrow.
4. If You’re Struggling to Accept the Reality of Your Loss
“Acceptance asks only that you embrace what’s true.” — Cheryl Strayed
Acceptance is not about liking a situation; it’s about recognizing that what happened did in fact happen and that circumstances cannot be changed or reversed. I will never ask you to like, love, or be grateful for the death of your loved one—that’s wildly inappropriate. What I will ask you to do is accept their death as a reality in your life and answer this question: “Given that the death of my loved one is a fact, where do I go from here?” Acceptance is not the final stage of grief; it is the beginning of stepping into your life after loss.
5. If You’re Searching for Strength
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” — Rachel Carson
You may not believe it now, but your coming back is inevitable. Grief is not a linear slide into darkness. It is a cyclical path that eventually rotates into light. Spring comes after the cold, harsh winter. Yes, there are seasons when grief is louder and more disruptive, but there are also seasons when grief backs off, your strength returns, and night turns into morning. It can be helpful to think of grief not as a detour from life, but as one of its many seasons.
6. If You Feel Like You’ll Never Be Happy Again
“You can be happy again, but you can never be happy and the same again.” — Sallie Tisdale
“How to be happy again” may not be the first thing you Google after a loved one dies, but regaining happiness, joy, and even laughter is on the minds of most grievers. As crappy as we feel right now, we want to know that it’s not going to be this way forever—and beyond that, that grief hasn’t broken our ability to feel cheerful and upbeat. You are not alone in wondering whether happiness will return; I assure you it will… just maybe not in the same way you knew it before. Happiness returns for all of us eventually, but it looks much different than the happiness we felt pre-loss. Your future happiness is informed by grief, and that’s normal and okay.
7. If You’re Looking for Comfort
“People you love never die… Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.” — Matt Haig
Even though your loved one’s body is no longer physically here, you are allowed to maintain an emotional, mental, and spiritual relationship with them. You are even allowed to change the boundaries of your relationship, such as how often you speak with them and the ways in which you communicate. Death ended your loved one’s life, but your love for them and your need to include them in your life live on.
8. If You’re Feeling Stuck in Emptiness
“Perhaps grief is not about empty, but full. The full breath of life that includes death. The completeness, the cycles, the depth, the richness, the process, the continuity and the treasure of the moment that is gone the second you are aware of it.” — Alysia Reiner
There’s an illusion that grief is a nothingness, a void or an abyss in which everything awful and dark and heartbreaking lives. The longer I sit with my grief, the more I understand that grief is a richness, one of life’s “expert levels” that we unlock when someone we really love dies. Recognizing that death is a part of life adds weight and dimension to the everyday—a beautiful and sad knowing that nothing lasts forever. A life with grief is not a curse; it’s a reminder to treasure the things we love about our lives… because one day we will be gone, too.
9. If You Need to Feel Less Alone
“We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world – the company of those who have known suffering.” — Helen Keller
On the outside, family, friends, and total strangers might seem to have their lives perfectly together. You may feel like you’re the only one in the world experiencing heartache at the level you’re feeling it. And in some ways, that’s true. No one but you knows exactly what it’s like to walk in your shoes and experience your loss. But, in other ways, every single person who has ever lived knows what it means to suffer. Everyone has lost, grieved, mourned, or been heartbroken at some level. And there is a sort of solidarity and comfort in that.
10. If You Feel Like the Only Griever in the Room
“We all carry the dead with us everywhere we go.” — Caleb Wilde
Whether you can see it or not, just about everyone you know is carrying a dead person (or two, or three) around with them. These dead loved ones aren’t in physical form, of course, but exist in stories, memories, clothing, and jewelry. We are all made up of the people who came before us and the people who died in our lifetimes. We all have a story about a dead person to share.
11. If You’re Ready to Take the Next Step
“The dead can survive as a part of the lives of those that still live.” — Kenzaburō Ōe
When someone you love dies, you get the final say on how much space their presence occupies in your life. Of course, they don’t leave your mind for a second, but how much of your time would you like to devote to honoring their memory and celebrating their life? What rituals, practices, and traditions would you like to perform in their absence? You are the conductor of the choir that is your life. What notes will your loved one sing?
Looking for More Healing Quotes?
These quotes offer comfort, encouragement, and, most importantly, the knowledge that you are not alone in your grief. Remember, grief is not something to be fixed or solved; it is something to be lived through.
And sometimes finding the right words for what you’re feeling can make all the difference between living through grief alone and feeling surrounded by others who have seen and known grief just like you.
If you’d like even more bite-size, daily wisdom for navigating life after the death of a loved one, my book Your Grief, Your Way offers practical, comforting guidance to help you reorient to the world after loss and honor your loved one’s memory in meaningful ways.
Click here to learn more about the book and purchase a copy.
