Jayson Greene > Quotes

“Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“We learn to live with the sadness like a great, lovely companion, because it’s a soft sadness that softens the heart and makes you open to everything.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“Grief, I am learning, is a world you move into—a world of softer voices, gentler gazes, closer observation, heightened compassion.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“I avoid my gaze in the mirror; I have no interest in learning what it feels like to meet my eyes.”
― Jayson Greene

“Grief is a reflection of a connection that has been lost,”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“Grief is a reflection of a connection that has been lost,” he says, with the slight loping cadence you adopt when you’ve repeated something a thousand times. “It is a reflection of that love you had for that individual.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“I see synchronicities in the most mundane activities. Waiting in line at the grocery store, I look at the shelf of diapers. I remember, briefly, when I wasn’t buying diapers anymore, because my kid was dead. I remember how it felt to look at them on this shelf then. I think about how it feels to look at them and need them again. My chest compresses and I take some odd, gulping breaths to avoid sobbing in the checkout line. Raw, unprocessed grief like this startles me whenever I find it, like turning over a rock and finding fresh wet dirt. It’s then that I realize, or remember, that there are hundreds of spots like these inside of me.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“We are a difficult, ungovernable species, forever staving off chaos with one hand and succumbing to it with the other. We aren’t here long enough to stop fighting death, to relax into our existence and gaze clearly. We thrash, mostly blindly, from one pole of oblivion to another. We are lucky if we truly notice three or five things in between. The rest is shouting, or being shouted at, or hiding underneath a blasted scrap from a raging storm.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“That night, Stacy cries hard in my arms. I hold her, staring at the ceiling, thinking that no matter the evidence mustered on either side, the case made, there is one thing that an arguing parent and child will always both be right about: You didn’t know what it felt like to be me.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“I know we will face difficulties we cannot foresee, but I have faith we will confront them together and never lose sight of each other.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“she found the places in us that were small and pushed until we grew bigger.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“A year and three months since that day, and two days before Harrison is scheduled to arrive, I take turns talking to both of my children. They seem to be in the same place right now—one dead, one unborn—which makes my life on earth feel even more tenuous. We’re right here, Daddy, I keep hearing, but no matter where I walk, I never find them. There are none of my children here, either, I think rounding every corner.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“The real pain isn't in the leg being mangled. It's in the way the bone sets.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“The pieces of our lives are scattered everywhere, we can never pick them up again; there is some peace in immediately understanding that.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“A pall of societal shame hovers over everyone in this club....Children who lose parents are orphans; bereaved spouses are widows. But what do you call parents who lose children? It seems telling to me there is no word in our language for our situation. It is unspeakable, and by extension, we are not supposed to exist.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“If you were built for optimism, you just had to figure out a way to stay that way. We couldn't keep not caring, even if we wanted to; we just weren't made for it. I felt an unexpected throb of empathy for pessimists: You can't help it, either.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“We push the apartment door open and are greeted by silence. Nothing in here knows about Greta’s death—not her red horsey with its empty smile, the toy bin beneath the living room chair, the straps on her purple high chair that she would fiddle with. We bring the news with us into each room, like smallpox.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“Death visits all corners of the world; it comes for drunk teenagers who careen off dark country roads; it comes for babies tangled in Venetian blinds in tract homes; it comes for children found floating in suburban pools. These are just buildings; they have no special role to play.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“Her emotions, as a result, are private, wordless things, more sound and sensation than conscious thought.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“Memories are created, not recorded... Together, we create the version of each event that we love the most, the one that accords most deeply with your - our - sense of self.”
― Jayson Greene, UnWorld

“Huddled over my family, I look out the window to the glimmering buildings crowding out the sky. The thought flashes once like a pinprick on my consciousness: The city killed her. We did this. Stacy and I, alone in our families, were foolish enough to attempt to rear a baby in the heart of this crowded and clamorous place.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“I imagine it’s the same for all new parents: you slowly learn to believe in your child’s ongoing existence. Their future begins to take shape in your mind, and you fret over particulars. Will she make friends easily at preschool? Does she run around enough? Life remains precarious, full of illnesses that swoop in and level the whole family like a field of salted crops. There are beds to tumble from, chairs to run into, small chokable toys to mind. But you no longer see death at every corner, merely challenges, an obstacle course you and your child are running, sometimes together and often at odds with each other.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“Sex is still an abstraction, at every moment except during the actual sex... Nothing else seems real when it's happening, and then when it's over, it's like it never even happened.”
― Jayson Greene, UnWorld

“I also spent a little time ruminating on the idea of a "friend" - was friendship a state activated only by proximity, or was it mostly a thought you carried around with you, like a belief in God or an optimistic disposition, that helped with daily existence?”
― Jayson Greene, UnWorld

“Stacy simply says no and leaves everyone unscathed and unimplicated. Me, I opt for the hard way every single time, with all the stricken faces and the “I’m so sorrys” this implies. I take guilty, grim satisfaction in being able to blamelessly detonate this grenade in the lives of strangers. It is a cruel and ungenerous leg sweep in response to a question born only of fellowship and human curiosity. “Yeah, I had a fucking kid. She died. Have a pleasant afternoon.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir of Life and Love After Unimaginable Loss

“We are all the walking wounded,”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“in a way: there is something clarifying about her immediate misery, the way it robs us of our ability to think about the future or ponder its meaning.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“I avoid my gaze in the mirror; I have no interest in learning what it feels like to meet my eyes”
― Jayson Greene

“Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent. I feel like I’ve discovered an opening. I don’t know quite what’s behind it yet. But it is there. I open up into a sprint, liberated.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars

“have to stay here for a long time. That means—that means I’m going to have to forget you a little, baby girl. It’s the only way I can stay here. I’m going to have to let go of you a little bit.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars