"I said her name. 

I recited 'Lovesong', a poem I like a great deal but she never though much of.  I apologised for reading it and told myself not to worry.

The ashes stirred and seemed eager so I tilted the thin and I yelled into the wind

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU

and up they went, the sense of a cloud, the failure of clouds, scientifically quick and visually hopeless, a murder of little burnt birds flecked against the grey sky, the grey sea, the white sun, and gone.  And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU

and their voice was the life and song of their mother. 
Unfinished.  Beautiful.  Everything."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Connoisseurs, they were, of how to miss a mother."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"This is what we know of Dad.  He was a
quiet boy.  He drifted off on family walks,
he doodled and drew and his feelings were
easily hurt by rough kids at school.  He
didn't have a head for sums.  He spent the
first twenty years of his life reading books,
being not-bad-but-not-skilled at football
and waiting for Mum.  He loved the Greek
myths and Russians and Joyce.  He was
waiting to be our Dad.

And then our Mum and Dad were in love
and they were truly dry-stone strong and
durable and people speak of ease and joy
and spontaneity and the fact that their two
smells became one smell, our smell.  Us.

Afterwards he was quieter.  He was, for two
or three years, by all accounts, very odd.
He had the perpetual look and demeanour
of someone floating, turning in the beer-
gold light of evening and being surprised
by the enduring warmth.  A rolled-over
shoulder half-squint half-smile.  Caught
baffled by the perplexing slow-release of
sadness for ever and ever and ever.  Which
I suppose, looking back, was because of us.
He couldn't rage.  He couldn't want to die.
He couldn't rail against an absence when
it was grinning, singing, freckling in the
English summer tweedle dee tweedle dum
in front of him.  Perhaps if Crow taught
him anything it was a constant balancing.
For want of a less dirty word: faith. 

A howling sorry which is
yes which is thank you which is onwards."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"And I stood and breathed their air and considered - as always - things like fragility, danger, luck, imperfection, chance, being kind, being funny, being honest, eyes, hair, bones, the impossible hectic silent epidermis rejuvenating itself, never nervous, always kissable, even when scabbed, even so salty I made it, and I felt so many nights utterly, totally yanked apart by how much I loved these children..."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"There's grief and there's impractical obsession.

I was impractically obsessed with before, I said."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her.  How physical my missing is.  I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more.  The whole city is my missing her."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the thing as it swells and bakes."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Again.  I beg everything again."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments.  Our delicate cross-stich of bickers."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Where are the fire engines?  Where is the
noise and clamour of an event like this?
Where are the strangers going out of their
way to help, screaming, flinging bits of
emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment
at us to try and settle us and save us?

There should be men in helmets speaking
a new and dramatic language of crisis.
There should be horrible levels of noise,
completely foreign and inappropriate for
our cosy London flat."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter