“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
“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
“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the ‘presence of absence.'”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated November 28, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 69.
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category: absence, alone, grief, loneliness, mourning, nothing, solitude
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“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
“Sorrow almost resents love, it is so inflamed.”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: January 1878 letter to Mrs. Samuel Bowles, in Emily Dickinson Letters, Emily Fragos ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 198.
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category: grief, mourning, sorrow
medium: Letter
“I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side. The thought to look down some day, and see the crooked steps we came, from a safer place, must be a precious thing…”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: May 1862 letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, in Emily Dickinson Letters, Emily Fragos ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 194.
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category: depression, grief, mourning, suffering
medium: Letter
“We are in many many troubles for the moment, so many that grief loses its dignity and bursts out laughing.”
Robert Frost
more infosource: July 9, 1931 letter to Louis Untermeyer from North Bennington, Vermont, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 209.
category: grief, laughter, trouble
medium: Letter
“I have not a desire but a need for solitude.”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated January 22, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 91.
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category: grief, introvert, mourning
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“Everyone is ‘extremely nice’—and yet I feel entirely alone. (‘Abandonitis’).”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated January 8, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 86.
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category: alone, grief, loneliness, mourning, nice
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now.”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated November 11, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 44.
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category: grief, loneliness, mourning, solitude
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now.”
Marcel Proust
more infosource: 1907 letter to Georges de Lauris, whose mother had just died, in Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 170.
category: grief, mourning, pleasure
medium: letter
via: Carolyn Deuschle“Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces—down to the last glassy splinter.”
Saul Bellow
more infosource: letter to Martin Amis, dated March 13, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 516–17.
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category: death, grief, loss, mourning
medium: letter
“This house contained her, and I paced its rooms up and down. I moved furniture in the living room, undoing arrangements that accommodated her illness—her blue chair next to mine as we watched movies together. Walking up and down, often I howled. No one would hear me, deep in the country, to dial 911. My outbursts frightened our dog Gus, who wondered what he had done wrong. He searched for Jane everywhere and asked me to fetch her back. Several times each day, he brought me one of her shoes—slippers or sneakers—and set it on the floor beside me.”
Donald Hall
more infosource: “Grief’s House,” in Unpacking the Boxes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 151.
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category: death, dog, grief, love, mourning
medium: memoir
“That’s how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible: Daughters and sons. First cousins. The neighbor kid. The first child. The last child. Your older brother. Some of their names have been forgotten; some never had names in the first place. They disappeared under heaps of advice. Don’t dwell. Have another child, a makeup baby. Life is for the living. But then another baby dies, and here they are again, in stories, and you will love them all, and—if you are the mother of a dead child yourself—they will keep coming to you. A couple I know just lost their baby. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. I know a couple…”
Elizabeth McCracken
more infosource: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 136–37.
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category: child, death, grief, loss, mourning
medium: memoir
“It isn’t the sorrow of last winter that stabs, it is those moments of hope—remembering those moments of hope is unbearable.
I planned to have him sleep in my bed the first night he came back.
It is not hard looking back at sorrow but at happiness.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 14.
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category: death, grief, hope, kidnap, mourning, sorrow
medium: diary
notes: diary entry dated Thursday, February 16, 1933; Anne and Charles Lindbergh's son Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. was kidnapped on the evening of March 1, 1932 at the age of twenty months
grief