“It may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was ninety-two does not diminish—it only magnifies—the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.”
Stephen Colbert
more infosource: Stephen Colbert’s tribute to his mother, Lorna Tuck Colbert, on The Colbert Report, June 19, 2013.
category: death, grief, mother
medium: Televison
“Members of some ancient tribe or other had the custom of placing either a black or a white pebble into a jar at the end of every day, depending on whether the day had been bad or good. A sensible custom. At the end of someone’s life his jar was turned upside down and it could then be seen if it had been a happy or unhappy life. Instead of that stone ritual, I could write in this exercise book at the end of every day: life is beautiful, or miserable, or difficult, or delightful, or whatever. I’ll do that for a whole month. Very curious to see how it will turn out.”
Etty Hillesum
more infosource: Thursday, August 7, 1941 entry, in Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum: 1941–1943 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 78.
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category: custom, death, life, ritual
medium: Diary
“Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
George Saunders
more infosource: “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year,” by Joel Lovell, New York Times Magazine, January 3, 2013.
category: death, open, possibility, receptive
medium: Magazine profile
“I want to tell you that Rose was an extraordinary dog, bossy and demanding of attention, comforting in her very presence. Famously, she first appeared in the pages of Vogue fifteen years ago. I told the story of her puppyhood and our first meeting in a popular article that was later reprinted and anthologized. She sat on my shoulder in book-jacket photographs. When she was very dirty after a run, I would tell her to go get in the bathtub, and she would. She once scampered onto the headrest of my parked car, made a vertical leap through the open sunroof, and ran across the parking lot, into the grocery store, and up and down every aisle until she found me. She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely.”
Ann Patchett
more infosource: “The Sense of an Ending,” Vogue, Sept 2012.
category: death, grief, mourning, pet, pet loss
medium: Pet eulogy
“Carlo died—
Would you instruct me now?”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 449.
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category: death, dog, grief, mourning, pet
medium: letter
notes: letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, late January 1866 — Carlo was Dickinson's Newfoundland, her "shaggy ally" — more info about Carlo here
“And they saw hope pass by in a train.”
Paul Fusco
more infosource: Description of mourners lined up along the railroad tracks, as the train carrying RFK traveled from New York City to Washington, in “April 23, 1969: R.F.K. Assassin Sirhan Sirhan Sentenced to Death,” April 23, 2012. Stunning slideshow of photographs here. (Thanks, DW!)
category: death, funeral, hope, photography, politics, Robert F. Kennedy, train
medium: Newspaper article
“I go to seek a great perhaps.”
François Rabelais
more infosource: Rabelais (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), xxi.
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category: death, last words, perhaps, unknown
medium:
“One day when I got home at Fourteen Wright Street, Judy opened the door and looked so stricken that I said, ‘Judy, what’s happened? Has Tom Jones died?’ That was our cat. She said, ‘No, but Volta Hall has had a heart attack and died.’ I suppose this is one of the most terrifying blows life has to offer: when your psychiatrist disappears. Within the next two days I wrote an elegy for Volta Hall which is in the Collected Poems and in which the repeated line is, ‘Now the long lucid listening is done.’ I sent this to his widow with a bunch of violets. There was no reply. I thought perhaps there is an unwritten rule that the wife of a psychiatrist does not make contact with a patient even after he himself has died. So I thought no more about it. About ten years later I had a note from her asking if she could come to see me. She came and told me that I would never know what that poem had meant, that she could give it to her children so they could see what her husband and their father had been for so many patients and what he was in himself. She also came—and this touched me deeply—to ask my blessing on her remarriage, as though I was speaking, in a way, for Volta. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s what he would want.’
You never know, when you send out a bird with an olive branch in its beak, whether it will come back or not.”
May Sarton
more infosource: Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 130–31.
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category: condolence, death, olive branch, psychology
medium: Journal
“The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”
Piet Oudolf
more infosource: “A Landscape in Winter, Dying Heroically,” by Sally McGrane, New York Times, January 31, 2008.
category: death, flower, landscape, lifecycle, nature, plant
medium: Newspaper profile
“To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck and sometimes a matter of having or not having the gift to endure and the will to.”
Tennessee Williams
more infosource: Tennessee Williams: Memoirs (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975), 3.
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category: community, death, endurance, love, survival
medium: Memoir
“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is.”
Dudley Clendinen
more infosource: “The Good Short Life,” The New York Times, July 9, 2011.
medium: Op-Ed
“A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.”
Stewart Alsop
more infosource: Stay of Execution: A Sort of Memoir (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1973), 299.
medium: Memoir
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
John Keats
more infosource: “Ode to a Nightingale,” in The Poetical Works of John Keats (London: Reeves & Turner, 1884), 271.
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medium: poetry
via: Fannie Bushin“I can’t die. It would ruin my image.”
Jack LaLanne
more infosource: “Jack LaLanne, Founder of Modern Fitness Movement, Dies at 96,” by Richard Goldstein, The New York Times, January 23, 2011.
category: death, health, image
medium: Obituary
“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
Tobias Wolff
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