Balthasar - Death necessary for our fulfillment/completion

“The life of man reaches fulfillment through a succession of many deaths.” BASIL

After all is said and done, death still remains the decisive situation of life. From it everything Christian could be derived. Fénelon used to say that the art of asceticism consists in the soul’s dying before the body. Paul’s mortui estis [“you have died”] in the end includes not only continual mortification but also the knowledge that everything that has not yet died possesses a merely preliminary character (this includes my virtue and my whole spiritual life and effort). Death is above all poverty, but also obedience and chastity.

 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Parting

Balthasar - Our existence is “structured for sacrifice" (finally in death)

Our existence, in its very foundations, is structured for sacrifice. As we grow up we want to become something, to grasp, to climb; but then the curve takes a downward turn. Quietly life takes from our hands everything we have snatched up. In the end we are granted the possibility of dying and, with it, that of performing the highest act of homage before the Eternal One.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Man

Von Speyr - Death of a loved one as "the breaking off of a dialogue"

The most compelling consequence of death is not merely separation but a growing limitation of understanding, the breaking off of a dialogue, a rapport, a love which had thought it was wider and bigger. My friend is dead, but this death tears holes in my own existence.

Adrienne von Speyr, The Mystery of Death (1953) 

It has occurred to me that the moments when I find myself most noticeably missing Mum tend be those when I have the impulse to "converse" with her, whether figuratively or literally (either "Mum would have said this about what just happened" or "I would say this to Mum right now"). I think there really is something to the idea that relationships with those we love are like life-long conversations where we share ourselves with each other, and that one metaphor for the loss of a loved one is a conversation interrupted, seemingly before it was finished.