RefugiumDescribe your own situationTopic collection
Grief cannot be shortened. What can help are words from people who walked the same road – not as advice, but as company. For each quote you will find the loss behind it and how life continued afterwards. Further down there are separate sections on losing a partner, losing parents or children, and short words for a condolence card.
„Grief is the price we pay for love.“
Elisabeth II.1926–2022
The line comes from a message read out in St Thomas Church, New York, in September 2001 – days after the September 11 attacks, when hundreds of British families were mourning their dead.
The sentence became a worldwide comfort because it does not diminish grief but reframes it: grief is proof that something precious existed. To mourn is to have loved.
„No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.“
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
After his wife Joy died of cancer in 1960, Lewis wrote his notes into four empty exercise books – raw, angry, full of doubt. He first published them under a pseudonym, ashamed of his own despair.
Those notebooks became “A Grief Observed”, one of the most honest books on mourning ever written. Lewis found no quick comfort, but he found language – and gave millions of grieving people the sense that they were not going mad.
„What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.“
Helen Keller1880–1968
Keller lost her sight and hearing at 19 months. In 1936 Anne Sullivan died – her teacher and closest companion for almost fifty years, the person through whom she had found language at all.
Keller kept working, travelled to 35 countries and campaigned for blind people worldwide. Sullivan’s voice, she said, had never disappeared – it had become part of how she thought.
„You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better.“
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
Lincoln wrote these lines in December 1862 to Fanny McCullough, a young girl whose father had been killed in the Civil War. Lincoln had just lost his own eleven-year-old son Willie and suffered from severe depression.
He promised her no quick healing – only that the pain would change its shape. That is exactly what he experienced himself: he led the country onward without denying his loss.
„The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.“
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross1926–2004
As a young doctor, Kübler-Ross saw dying patients isolated and left unspoken to in hospitals. Against her colleagues’ resistance she insisted on talking with them – and was mocked for it for years.
Her book “On Death and Dying” changed end-of-life care worldwide and laid the ground for the modern hospice movement. Listening became an entire culture of farewell.
„One must also allow sorrow a place of its own.“
Etty Hillesum1914–1943
From 1941 Hillesum kept a diary in Amsterdam as the persecution of Jewish people closed in. Later she volunteered in the Westerbork transit camp in order to stand by others.
Her diaries were found and published after the war. They show a person who did not push suffering away but gave it room – and who kept a tenderness for life to the very end.
Losing the person you shared everyday life with means grieving twice: for the person and for the life you had together. These two women described exactly that – unsparingly and without consoling phrases.
„Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.“
Joan Didion1934–2021
In December 2003 Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack at the dinner table, while their daughter Quintana lay in an induced coma in intensive care. For a year Didion wrote down what grief does to the mind.
The result was “The Year of Magical Thinking”, which won the National Book Award. Her book gave countless mourners an explanation for thoughts they had believed were madness.
„My life as a happy one is ended!“
Königin Victoria1819–1901
On 14 December 1861 Prince Albert died at the age of 42. Victoria, then 42 herself and a mother of nine, wrote this line in her journal shortly afterwards and withdrew almost entirely from public life for years.
She wore black until her death – but she came back. Over the following forty years she reigned longer than any British monarch before her. Grief did not end her life; it changed its shape.
A loss inside your own family strikes at the order of life itself. Both people below lost a child – and years later found words for it that still carry others today.
„It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.“
Mark Twain1835–1910
In 1896 Twain's 24-year-old daughter Susy died of meningitis while he was abroad on a lecture tour. He learned of it by telegram and arrived too late to say goodbye.
Twain kept writing – and wrote about Susy in his autobiography so tenderly that her life, not her death, became the longer story. The lecture tour that had kept him away also paid off the debts with which he secured his family.
„Enough have died! No one must fall any more.“
Käthe Kollwitz1867–1945
Her youngest son Peter was killed in Flanders in October 1914, a few weeks after the war began, aged 18. Kollwitz then worked for eighteen years on a memorial for him.
In 1932 “The Grieving Parents” was placed in a war cemetery in Belgium – two kneeling figures, herself and her husband. Her pain became a memorial that still comforts visitors from around the world.
A condolence card does not need a long text. Two short, documented lines are enough – what matters is that they acknowledge the loss instead of trying to explain it.
„God does not fill the gap; rather, he keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other.“
Dietrich Bonhoeffer1906–1945
Bonhoeffer wrote these lines in December 1943 from prison in Berlin-Tegel to his friend Eberhard Bethge – as comfort for people who had lost someone in the war, and at the same time for himself.
His letters were published after the war as “Letters and Papers from Prison” and are among the most-read texts of consolation anywhere. His thought: the gap does not have to be closed for life to go on.
„Death is great. We are his, with laughing mouths.“
Rainer Maria Rilke1875–1926
The poem “Schlußstück” from “The Book of Images” (1902) was written while Rilke lived without a fixed home between Worpswede, Paris and Rome, writing intensively about transience.
Rilke did not present death as an enemy but as part of the same life – an image still printed on condolence cards today, because it neither trivialises nor frightens.
Tell Refugium in your own words what is on your mind – you will get a quote and the true story behind it that fits precisely.
Describe your own situation