Gail Caldwell Quotes

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

~ Gail Caldwell

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

~ Gail Caldwell

Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

~ Gail Caldwell

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

~ Gail Caldwell

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

~ Gail Caldwell

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.

~ Gail Caldwell

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

~ Gail Caldwell

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

~ Gail Caldwell

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

~ Gail Caldwell

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

~ Gail Caldwell

We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.

~ Gail Caldwell