The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift
Steve Leder
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Your children will be sad," I tell Franny, "but they will not die because you die. They will live and laugh and love with everything you have given them in their hearts forever. They will discover you in unexpected moments and places for the rest of their lives.”
“Understanding death - its rituals, its lessons, its gift to reshape love through memory, its grief, its powerful reminder that it is not what but who we have that matters - gives our lives exquisite meaning.”
“That’s really all they ask of us—our parents; our lovers, husbands, and wives; our children and dear friends. That we carry them gently in our lives as they carried us in theirs. Not with crushing sadness, for they do not wish such weight upon us. But with lightness and warmth. God bless them for the memories they left for us that make carrying them with joy possible. The wisdom and love they bequeathed us. The joy and comfort they brought to us as they carried us through life so that now we might carry them forever in our hearts—without bitterness, without crushing sadness. When someone has loved us well and long, we need not buckle beneath the weight of sorrow. Instead, we can carry them with us with gratitude, completeness, and joy.”
“It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form. I never feel this more deeply than when gazing upon a dead body, a vessel emptied of its life force, a force that must surely now exist elsewhere.”
“When you show people a picture of a circle with a small wedge cut out of it, their eyes first go to the missing piece every time. It is easy among the doctors, the needles, and the tubes to lose sight of the beauty that was. Despite our pain, our fear, and our very real loses, we would do well to think about our many past blessing with our loved one who is now diminished. There is so much more to who we were and who we are than just the missing piece.”
“We are helpless in death, but we are not helpless in life.”
“This is the beauty and the tragedy of my father's life and death. For him, for me, for most of us at the time, for better and for worse, death is life's mirror.”
“, and not because they are exceptional, but because they are human, like all of us, with a capacity to move forward in life despite the worst pain of death and grief.”
“The beauty of flowers depends on the fact that they soon wither. How deeply could one deathless "human" being really love another? It is the simple fact that we do not have forever that makes our love for each other so profound.”
“have seen more than a thousand dead bodies, and it is clear that the body is not the person—that there is so much more to us than our corporeal being. It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form. I never feel this more deeply than when gazing upon a dead body, a vessel emptied of its life force, a force that must surely now exist elsewhere.”
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Book Keywords:
loss, death, grief-and-loss, hope, parents, death-and-dying, inspirational, spirituality, dying-quotes
