My experience with both my parents is that grief has a lot of down sad things but I was also really emotionally raw in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely my relationships were hotter and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

We live in grief for having left the womb for having left the teat then school then home. In my case it was leaving marriages and the death of my wife.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Going through the grief period of my dad and losing him - that was the worst thing because you know when you get that call. When you are seven eight years old you have that almost vision in your mind of what that's going to be like and what your going to feel like and it doesn't prepare you.

Politicians... talk in generalities and lies and I think they've caused all our grief. They're so awful they're really funny. I hate thinking this because my dad loved politics.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire but at the same time there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life of how things change how they're not the same ever again.

Time heals griefs and quarrels for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief the souvenir of pain.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

Shock confusion fear anger grief and defiance. On Sept. 11 2001 and for the three days following the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil President George W. Bush led with raw emotion that reflected the public's whipsawing stages of acceptance.

Allowing children to show their guilt show their grief show their anger takes the sting out of the situation.

My heart is so light that it's amazing. I get to play all this grief all this loss all this disaster and chaos. It's hysterically funny. I am very light.

But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

If you've got to my age you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.