Status Updates From Klage Um Einen Sohn (Abhand...

If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded, if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, if insight is not deepened, if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, if aching for a new day is not intensified, if hope is weakened and faith diminished, if from the experience of death comes nothing good, death has won. Then death, be proud

“Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold you up over the chasm until you’re forced to walk out onto it.”

“Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that's when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn't quite it. Perhaps what's over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that.
Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.”

Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. If I had forgotten that hope, then it would have brought light into my life to be reminded of it. But I did not think of death as a bottomless pit. I did not grieve as one who has no hope. Yet Eric is gone, here and now

“THE TEARS … streamed down, and I let them flow as freely as they would, making of them a pillow for my heart. On them it rested.” —AUGUSTINE, Confessions IX, 12

“But why celebrate stoic tearlessness? Why insist on never outwarding the inward when that inward is bleeding? Does enduring while crying not require as much strength as never crying? Must we always mask our suffering? May we not sometimes allow people to see and enter it? I mean, may men not do this?”

“Each death is as unique as each life. Each has its own stamp. Inscape. The tree in Hopkin’s garden had an inscape, but so did the felling of the tree. And one child’s death differs from another not in the intensity of the pain it causes but in the quality. To see a young life wither and die is as painful as to see it snapped off.”

😭💔

i can only read in increments because i start crying and can’t see the words

this is wrecking me