Quotes about Mourning

When we mourn those who die young - those who have been robbed of time - we weep for lost joys.  We weep for opportunities and pleasures we ourselves have never known.  We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives.  We believe that the untried soul, trapped inside its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy we still seek.  We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep.  All this we say, as we sleepwalk through our time and through years of days and nights.  We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never ending.  Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over.  And just another Monday.  Ah, but those lost Mondays of our young dead friend!  How much better they would have been!  Years pass. Decades pass.  And living has not been done…

I stood on the balcony dark with mourning...
hoping the earth would spread its wings
in my uninhabited love.

When you
died I didn't
weep nor dream but knew you
like a god breathe in
each healing we begin.

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that a part of us shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it is completely filled, it will nevertheless remain something changed forever...

David Brainerd-Sunday, april 4 1742

O my Blessed  God! let me climb up near to Him, and love, and long, and plead, and wrestle, and strech after Him, and for deliverence from the body of sin and death. Alas! my soul mourned to think i should ever lose sight of its Beloved again. O come, Lord Jesus, amen.

I suspect that if we could sum up in a single sentence what our purpose in life would be - it's that we were born to be "fully Self-expressive".  And we could put a big chunk of the world's suffering under the categories of "suffering because we know that we're not expressing our Selves fully, or mourning that we don't even know who that is, or that we lost touch with that Self somewhere along the way".  It's incredibly frustrating to know that you have something inside of you like that and to not be quite reaching the point of giving birth to it - to be bringing it out into the world.