Today I am moved to quote from this exquisitely written memoir by former client Valerie Mills Brown. In it, she describes the act of reading to her mother in her final months, and of her own “remembrance of things past” and mining of the unspoken. Reading this book prompted me to buy a full set (six volumes) of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I have yet to read them, but on my bookshelf the boxed set stands—solid, patient, and timeless.

In Brown’s words:

I am reading Proust to my mother, who is almost ninety. Because conversations can be difficult, the reading grounds us. Her sentences are likely to take off in unexpected digressions, much as Proust’s often do. But unlike his, my mother’s sentences forget where they began, and spiral out into territories from which it can be difficult to return. She often seems to sleep while we read, but when I stumble on a word such as antimacassar or brougham, she will have the pronunciation on the tip of her tongue and provide me with a definition as well.

…reading the closing pages of Part I, I felt so completely awash with that indeterminate sorrow that I, too, was cut loose from my bearings. We were drawn in by Proust’s frantic effort to hold on to a moment in his past that he knew in fact to be lost forever. We, too, feel that we cannot go home again.

…how had I forgotten that Proust had always read as sad? Correctly or not, years ago I had translated À la recherche du temps perdu, not as time past, but as time lost, and read it as a prolonged, sensual dirge. Sharing this ritual of returning to Combray with my mother was to add a layer of loss on a story of loss that was inspiring our own reflections on loss. Loss of memory, loss of each other, beloved places and associations; even the overlapping nostalgia dimming. A melancholy enlightenment, indeed.

Meanwhile, the afternoon is looking toward evening. Apparently whether time is lost, revisited, recaptured, even recreated, it doesn't stop to differentiate.

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Memory Lane Stroll

October Question: Do you have a favorite quote about grief or loss?

We’d love to hear your brief personal reflections on the question of the month. Write your response for a chance to be featured in the next edition of our e-newsletter!

Staff responses

Megan St. Marie: “Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.”

―Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

Sean St. Marie: 

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

—From “Dirge Without Music,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Inventions of Farewell: A Collection of Elegies, ed. Sarah M. Gilbert

Ali de Groot: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

—C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Liz Sonnenberg: 

“...And when the work of grief is done,

The wound of loss will heal

And you will have learned

To wean your eyes

From that gap in the air

And be able to enter the hearth

In your soul where your loved one

Has awaited your return

All the time.”

—From “For Grief,” included in To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, by John O’Donohue

Nicole Miller: "Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried."

—Megan Devine, author of It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand, and

How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed: A Journal for Grief

Emma Solis: “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”

—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes On Grief

Olivia Go: “We are not wild idealized things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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To purchase books referenced in these quotations, as well as others on grief and loss, visit the Modern Memoirs affiliate page at Bookshop.org for our curated list of titles:

“Book List: Navigating Loss through Words: Books for Grief and Healing.”