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Fermil - Carlos Sagrera , 2025,

Spanish , b.1987 -

Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 33 cm.

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Day after day is just an exercise in managing myself

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I lost my best friend of 8 years a little over 2 months ago. She was my dog and she died of cancer. I don't even want to be alive anymore, not without her. I was just wondering if you have a collection of quotes/poems about grieving/ missing a loved one you could share with me?

i am so, so sorry that you’re going through this. i’m sending you so much love. here is a compilation of quotes that touches a bit on grief / surviving grief. i would highly recommend reading dog songs: poems by mary oliver bc she does write on the grief that comes w losing a dog, and the dark interval: letters on loss, grief, and transformation (a collection of rainer maria rilke letters).

mary oliver’s poem, “bazougey”

 a few quotes in particular on grief and healing:

“I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is not ease for the heart to be had from words of reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”

Samuel Beckett’s words of consolation to his friend, Alan Schneider

“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“The mere act of searching is proof that I refuse to get lost in my loss.”

Mahmoud Darwish, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi, “Journal of an Ordinary Grief,”

“This is what language is: / a habitable grief. A turn of speech / for the everyday and ordinary abrasion / of losses such as this / which hurts / just enough to be a scar.”

Eavan Boland, from New Collected Poems

Mary Oliver, from “Dog Talk” as featured in Dog Songs: Poems

“But sometimes words are the only hands / we have to touch a bruised memory / or cleanse a wound that never healed / or lift a body we carried for years / at last to the pyre of shared grief.”

Fred Dings, from Eulogy for a Private Man; “Words”

“But you will survive, only you must not hurry yourself. Grieving, mourning takes time, it has to change slowly from turbulence to calm flowing.”

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“...give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due...”

Franz Kafka, in a letter to Ottile Kafka

Mary Oliver, from “For I will consider my dog Percy”

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[...] But if you don't think in terms of masculine and feminine, perhaps there's no difference for you?

Not really, no. How difficult interviews are! In life, I'm rather mute. I respond very little. I'm mostly nothing, you see? I write, I continue to write. I have a beautiful typewriter.

[...] In general, does it take you a long time to write?

I don't know. I hardly write at all anymore. I have to think back to the time when I wrote. When it happens, it's like a little story of consumption. I sit there, for hours, before the typewriter. I look outside. I look inside me. And nothing comes out. For months, sometimes even for years. The more time passes, the more I think I have no existence.

— The New Yorker, Fleur Jaeggy Thinks Nothing of Herself

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But the cloud passes; we survive after all, our sensibilities mostly intact. Madness pecks at us from time to time; the unseen bird from unknown lands. It pecks away mostly at the foot of the trunk, never ascending high enough for us to take note. After all, maybe we avoid looking at it, we, who are not even certain such a bird as that can exist, and even if it did we are surely not worthy to look on it. And so we stand, and breathe and close our eyes. At night sometimes there’s a breeze. It carries sharp scents to our wooden senses. We forget, we remember, we forget.

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Biiig stretch

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The most evil person you know is posting about being a people pleaser

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Leonard Cohen, Book of longing.

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we used to turn the tv on and just watch whatever was on there

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The poet distilled his own liquor and had become so accomplished in this art that he could produce a fermented drink from almost any kind of organic matter. He carried it in a flask strapped about his waist, and whenever fatigue overtook him he would stop at some lonely point and raise the flask to his lips. Then the world would change color as a soap-bubble penetrated by a ray of light and a great vitality would surge and break as a limitless ocean through him. The usual superfluity of impressions would fall away so that his senses would combine in a single vast ray of perception which blinded him to lesser phenomena and experience as candles might be eclipsed in a chamber of glass exposed to a cloudless meridian of the sun.

– Tennessee Williams, from “The Poet,” One Arm and Other Stories (New Directions, 1948)

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i remember learning the word melancholy at age 7 or something and thinking oh this word's gonna be huge for me

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so it turns out that time actually does go by faster as you get older. just like how adults told me it would when i was younger. pisses me off

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i will never get over the way time and the environment behaved so differently when i was a kid. a saturday afternoon felt so vast and long. i could get absorbed into the colours and atmosphere of a tv show. even the food was better. even the air

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god forbid a woman is boring and a low achiever and likes to drink

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sorry i'm being an absent friend i'm being an absent self too

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An ache ashamed of itself, collapsing inwards. Hollowed out. A wound that, yet, refuses to close