Karolina Waclawiak Quotes

• “My mother died on September 22, 2019, just as I was finishing work on this book. As my brother beautifully wrote in his eulogy for her, “She was a true matriarch, a Jupiter in stature, and we were simply the moons lucky enough to orbit her, to be shaped by her gravity, and without her we are left with a space impossible to fill or inhabit.” I could not have captured the immense loss of her any better.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “Leaving is the initial rush of having your own space and your own time and your own life, but with an absence that feels so vast that it is literally unquantifiable.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “which seemed like it had come quickly and not quickly enough at all.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “There is something to be said about being the person who gets to move on in a new place—to start fresh, as people like to say. Meanwhile, the person who has chosen to stay behind is trapped among remnants of a familiar and distant life as they try to piece together a new way of being in an apartment that was once inhabited by someone they loved, or maybe even still love.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “She said big life changes like this weren’t uncommon because what we did was clarifying.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “we missed the real final moments that indicated the end. It was like people’s fixation with the final fight of a marriage: the end had come long before that final fissure, yet people always wanted to know what the breaking point was.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “Always men, because men always seemed to be going somewhere alone.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “What no one tells you is that a single woman at a dinner party is, more often than not, seen as a threat.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “And before she turned off to the road that led to Death Valley, she looked at me and nodded. My heart soared at this acknowledgment. I slowed to watch her become a black speck disappearing on the horizon and imagined that one day I would be able to find freedom, too.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “They were my age, but appeared to have done all the right things.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “When my insomnia had become unmanageable, my attempts to avoid grief had finally placed me exactly where I needed to be: among people struggling with their own sorrows—whether it be about humans, dogs, or a cat now gone—who wanted to do something about it.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “He smiled at me, a “bear with us” smile.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “People out in the world were filling their social-media feeds with momentous life changes like weddings and babies and new, serious jobs, and though some people in this room might have been doing just that, too, I was not. I had hit a point of stagnation, and I felt like I was dying.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “I didn’t have cable anymore, so I spent my nights wandering my apartment looking for things to clean. It was an immaculate space no one ever came to see.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “In it, her mother apologized, but said she saw no alternative. And she hoped her daughter could understand. How could someone quantify the daughter’s grief? What were the people left behind supposed to do with the knowledge that their need wasn’t enough to stick around for?”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “I looked down at where Pierre’s dog bed had been and noticed he had left a hairball behind.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “In the morning, as always, we pretended nothing happened. We wanted to believe it, really. We woke up as if we didn’t hear him whimper. As if we weren’t afraid he’d collapse each time he got up to go to the bathroom.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “What you have isn’t contagious,” I said. “No one wants to be around sick people. They don’t want to catch the sadness.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “Back in the room, my mother asked where we had gone, as if she didn’t know already. It was a game we always played while on vacation. Where did Dad go? As if he didn’t always go on the same hunt.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “I don’t sleep, really. Night is when I really know I’m dying.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “How would she survive? How would he? I knew what it felt like to want to save yourself—to feel like someone else’s decline was directly tied to your own—but, still, I didn’t want her to leave. It felt like a pre-emptive move—a distancing from the pain that was coming.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “When he answered, he looked very much alive, though he had the kind of dark circles under his eyes that made me believe he stared at the ceiling most nights, too.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “Bethanny didn’t know she was sick until her mother left her a letter saying she was going off to die. Bethanny had no closure with her mother. That’s why she had made having closure her mission—for both the dying and those left behind.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “We’re just here for a human experience. And maybe that human experience is just to learn one thing. For me, it’s learning how to forgive. Like, someone has a life with terrible parents or something, and maybe all I was supposed to do was learn to forgive them and maybe a handful of people who came after them. And that’s it. Then I can move on to whatever’s next for me. That was what I came here for.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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• “It wasn’t that I had attachment issues to anything; it was more like I didn’t feel attached to anything at all. I looked at all the things that it wouldn’t hurt me to leave and understood that being too detached might actually be my problem.”

  Karolina Waclawiak

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