Kyleigh Leddy > Quotes

“No one tells you what a precious, fragile gift your mind is in the first place. No one tells you it can be lost.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“You wish there was an adequate term for what you are—like orphan or widower—a term that says 'I once meant something to somebody.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Only after we relinquish what is lost are we truly healed.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Tragedy can strike without premonition. A natural disaster can arrive when the kids are playing with their Christmas presents. The narrative containers we use to impose structure and morality onto our lives no longer fit. Happy endings do not necessitate good deeds. Pain is immune to virtue.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“When you experience severe loss at a young age—the kind of loss that makes you think your own life no longer worth living—it is as if a gulf has appeared, dividing the world into two separate, insurmountable cliffs: those who understand, who have lost someone truly dear to them, and those who do not understand.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“It might be possible to code technology to predict human speech patterns or program artificial intelligence to respond back to our questions. We might suffer a migraine when we’re stressed—a dagger at our temple—but when our souls are irreparably damaged, it’s not our minds that hurt. It’s right there in the violent wanting of our chests. You know this because yours has just broken.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Suffering is never imagined. The brain is the body, the brain is physical. We accept that our bodies can be injured—a broken bone, an infectious disease—but we ignore the injuries endured by our brains, because we assume a sense of control over our psychological hurt. This control is often an illusion.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“You wish there was an adequate term for what you are—like orphan or widower—a term that says “I once meant something to somebody.” When you were a little girl, you went mute from lack of need, but now you are mute with grief.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“This is how youth should be measured, I thought, by how badly you allow yourself to be treated and for how long—even, or perhaps especially, by yourself.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Grief is never a closed case. Grief is the crack in the window, the chilly draft that wafts in with the night. Grief is hope in the absence of hope. Grief is saying “lost” instead of “gone,” and “passed away” instead of “dead,” because to say the latter would be to admit a definitive stopping point—irretrievable, irreversible. The story only goes this far.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Perhaps all childhoods are mirrors we hold up, finding our identities in the reflection. Over time, these images fissure and crack, become foggy and confused. We become foggy and confused in turn. We crack in turn, too.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Reincarnation is about your soul, and what was wrong with Kait was purely physical: neurochemical. If reincarnation is real, then my sister will come back healthy and happy, and we will find her again, but she won't need saving this time.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“When something truly terrible happens, we fixate on the details, the minutiae, the chronology. Do these specifics ground us somehow? Do we focus on the quotidian because we know that nothing will ever be nothing again?… Never again will the sky hold the unblemished clarity of a life without loss.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“I look back on my childhood the way you remember a restaurant you visited in a foreign city in winter, escaping the chill of the air and ducking into a random café, warm and cozy. It's the first bite, the warmth, the feeling of safety, the best meal you've ever had. You return years later, older, changed, and try to find it again but can't. The streets are unfamiliar, un-welcoming, and when you finally do return, the lights are brighter than you remembered, the food colder, less flavorful. You never quite recreate it again.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“As a modern society, we have largely abandoned traditional mourning rituals. We are as eager to hear someone say that they are 'okay' as we are to say it ourselves. I used to wish that I could wear all black like a Victorian widow—a veil over my face that said, “Be gentle with me.” I used to wish there was an etiquette book for grief: a protective formality written into the code of our society, a temporary insanity clause defendable in the court of life.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“We keep and keep and keep. We remember and remember and remember. We collect heart-shaped shells and signs and old notebooks and recollections. We hold on, memorize the lines of her tan, slender hands and the sound of her laugh, engraving ourselves with the smallest details, lest we ever forget. We try to make amends, reason with ghosts, explain ourselves to the wind. And then, there comes a time when we must let go.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“I see her in what is beautiful or interesting or sad, which is to say that I see her in everything. She is nowhere tangible, which is to say that she is everywhere.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“I was sixteen, almost seventeen, I still believed that misfortune dragged with it apprehension, a hunch. I still believed in superstitions and wishing on 11:11 and blind faith… I didn’t yet understand that life is littered with random contingencies, change encounters, unforeseeable complications.”
― Kyleigh Leddy

“The refusal to believe in an afterlife is as stubborn and desperate as the desire to. It is as impossible to prove the existence of life after death as it is to disprove it. All that is left in the graveyard of this intellectual stalemate is personal choice. If you are forced to spend the rest of your life without someone, if you are brave enough to keep living despite this singular, crushing fact, then who is to judge how you find strength?”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“Mental illness can be as unpredictable and indiscriminate as a natural disaster. It doesn’t happen to you until it does. You’re safe until you’re not.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

“For better and for worse, hope proves itself to be surprisingly resilient.”
― Kyleigh Leddy, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister