'When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.'

4.5
haunting.
I need to stop reading books about death and grief it only increases my fear of losing those I love

'The sight of my mother’s nakedness had jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more. As a child I had loved it dearly; as an adolescent it had filled me with an uneasy repulsion: all this was perfectly in the ordinary course of things and it seemed reasonable to me that her body should retain its dual nature, that it should be both repugnant and holy – a taboo. But for all that, I was astonished at the violence of my distress.'

'For me, my mother had always been there, and I had never seriously thought that some day, that soon I should see her go. Her death, like her birth, had its place in some legendary time. When I said to myself ‘She is of an age to die’ the words were devoid of meaning, as so many words are. For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.'

'This time my despair escaped from my control: someone other than myself was weeping in me.'

'She had been taught to pull the laces hard and tight herself. A full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated.'

'If she has a few days of happiness like this, keeping her alive will have been worth while,’ said Poupette to me. But what was it going to cost? '

'Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.'