Sophie

“Our loved ones are just as important to us as food and water. If I ask you right now where your boyfriend or girlfriend is, or where you would go to pick up your children, you probably have a pretty good idea of how to locate them. We use brain maps to find our loved ones, to predict where they are, and to search for them when they are gone. A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time. The unlikely situation that they are not on the map at all, the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“You’re a really terrible father,” I said, matter-of-fact. “You know that, right?” “Of course I know it. I’m dumb but I’m not stupid,” he said. “It’s not like you’re winning Daughter of the Year prizes yourself.” “Oh, fuck off.” “Same to you.”
― Kate Alice Marshall, What Lies in the Woods

“We can start healing when we stop trying to get our pain validated by the people who caused us harm. So often we look for external validation from those who aren't emotionally capable of seeing the pain they caused and may never be capable of doing that in his lifetime.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss