Loved and Missed

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You can include this message along with one or two short memories that you cherish the most. Ways to Say ‘You’ll Always Be Remembered’ in a Speech or Eulogy Viewed this way, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all’ may as well stand in as a two-line abstract for the poem as a whole: Tennyson does indeed emerge, at the end of his long examination of his own loss, a better man who can celebrate Hallam’s memory and the brief time he knew him before Hallam’s untimely death.

i have truly never made a greater fool of myself than when laughing and crying in equal measure, in public places, while reading this book.

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Curiously, although Tennyson was the first to use the exact wording of the sentiment as it is now known (‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’), the idea behind the quotation, as is so often the case with a good proverb, is older. In his 1700 play The Way of the World, William Congreve has a character assert, ‘Say what you will, ’tis better to be left than never to have loved.’

The author is careful not to make Ruth a saint. While her concern for her granddaughter’s welfare is clear, she admits that loneliness plays a part in her bid to keep her. She is also scornful when her confidante Jean finds a new friend in Caroline, her mean streak giving oxygen to Boyt’s waspish turn of phrase. Caroline, she notes, is “a football team I would not wear the scarf of even if caught in a freak blizzard”. Other secrets serve as a reminder that moral uprightness can ebb and flow as circumstances change. In Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, a grandmother gives her daughter an envelope of cash in exchange for her baby. This can’t end well, you think to yourself. But Loved and Missed isn’t about a battle over an infant; there is no tug of love or grand stand-off. Instead, the book is an acute, enormously moving study of familial love, and how the bonds between a mother and child can rupture, sometimes inexplicably. The phrase "gone but never forgotten" is a popular way to describe someone who has passed away, when their memory continues to live on. It's also a way to pay tribute to the impact that someone had. How can I express that someone is gone but never forgotten? The wonderful thing was that after the service everyone assembled round the coffin, making slow circuits of it, pointing things out to each other with delight. They had Xeroxed a prize-winning project she had done at school on the paintings of Queen Elizabeth I. There she was with a department store Santa, sullen in his muddy brown trainers while she grinned. She was caught in a handstand in her marigold leotard with the three BAGA badges sewn down one side. In cross-hatched shadows of the Eiffel Tower she stood squinting into the overdeveloped sunshine. She was all of her there. People were usually terrified of coffins and it was extraordinary to have drawn everybody close to her body at this moment, celebrating her exactly where she was lying at the last. A table piled with ladylike cakes went ignored. Poppy she was called. Poppy Richardson. British writer Boyt delivers a story of filial estrangement in her mordant and touching U.S. debut…Boyt’s assured effort brims with intelligence and feeling.”— Publishers Weekly

Feelings of love don’t go away when someone passes. You can let the person’s family know that their loved one is in your heart forever. 2. “Your life was a blessing; your memory, a treasure.” When 15-year-old Lily takes her brief star turn as narrator, it’s a relief to hear words tabooed by Ruth—“naloxone,” “syringe,” “opiate,” “overdose.” Through Lily’s eyes, we finally see her mother as Ruth cannot and will not, when Lily recalls Eleanor’s unexpected arrival at her school:

There is warmth, humour and wit in the story, helping to make what could be a rather depressing tale heartwarming and uplifting. Small acts of domesticity, particularly related to food and eating, warmth, clothing, comfort, are detailed throughout the book and reflect, I think, the overwhelming need for Ruth to nurture those around her.The themes of mother and daughter relationships, friendsips, loss and grieving and love were explored with depth, honesty and sensitivity. Ruth's selfless devotion to both Eleanor and Lily was striking and compelling. Ruth spends her life giving to others, making sacrifice after sacrifice with no complaints or self pity; rather a fear that she has wronged those she cares for. You are in my thoughts during this tragic time. ______ was one of a kind and their memory will live with us like no other I knew I could be guilty of not letting myself see things,” Ruth confides in the reader early on. The reason Eleanor cannot be a mother to Lily surfaces piecemeal at first, through Ruth’s half-averted eyes: the unsettling “high wattage” of Eleanor’s smile, her “fragile and bird-limbed” form, then, ominously, a “burnt spoon” amidst the chaos of her living room. Ruth finally uses the words “drugs” and “addicted” for the first time when, late in the novel, she attends a “meeting for families affected by drugs.” Before she bolts from the gathering, Ruth refuses to label Eleanor an “addicted person”: “All the other people were begging their mothers for help, handouts, hope, approval, cash or assorted crumbs of those things. Eleanor didn’t want us in her life. She’d turned us away.” Ruth, to put the case more bluntly than she would, takes her daughter’s addiction (a word that never appears in Loved and Missed) personally; in that sense, she may have more in common with the meeting’s other “mothers” than she cares to admit.