The Flicker of Old Dreams Quotes

“Pop said once that relationships are more often like old houses—the place where you want to live, but an ongoing project—something always leaking, peeling away, breaking down.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“It’s early morning and I’m already tired of the day.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“My mother has followed us into the house. My mother is the name I’ve given his grief. She was gone long before I knew what death was so, for me, she is an abstract loss, a game of guessing at the life I might have lived. My mother is a collection of stories and inanimate objects. She is a wedding ring in my father’s bedside drawer, a rosehips-flavored tea bag in the back of our kitchen cupboard that we both refuse to use or throw out. She is a picture of someone standing on the rims too far away to see. She is a book underlined only to page seven. She is a pair of burnt rosebushes in the yard that Pop won’t dig up. She is the line between his eyebrows, the groove where his smile would be. She is a feeling in the gut I can’t name or move.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“sorrows we don’t feel we can bear, apologies we can’t speak, habits we can’t break. But there are joys that sustain us. And I will never forget the three of us drinking wine together and sleeping in one room.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“One body, that’s all any of us get. One beautiful, maddening container for all we are and hope to be.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“At dusk, she stood in her yard and clapped to get her hens into the coop for the night. They never went until they were ready, not a minute before. We like to believe we have more control over our lives than we do.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“But none of this is closure or even reality, which will be much quieter, like walking through the same motions of your old life and having none of it feel familiar.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Most days are made up of simple moments, and he was a part of my sense of comfort and belonging here.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Except in real life, it’s not so easy. You get impatient. Because the dying goes on and on. You can’t seem to make them comfortable. The loving talk turns cranky, or sometimes the talk is just mundane and you end up watching TV.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“I want to know you,” he whispers. I set down my fork. “Whenever you see the real me,” I say, “you’re disappointed.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“But he made a space for me to sit beside him. We sat, knowing each other’s flaws—some of them, anyway—and let down our guards. Usually I’m more cautious, trying not to upset people, trying not to be noticed at all. It felt good to be seen.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“The jobs they had, the skills that defined their worth are gone. Perhaps they lie in bed at night and ask of dark ceilings, Who am I now? The question rubs against who they once were and the fear of being irrelevant. Set aside. Lost.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“The grieving can pretend that their loved ones are merely sleeping. That they will hear you when you bend over to whisper all you had meant to say.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“A mortician is an illusionist. The goal is to cushion reality, slow down how fast the hurt seeps in.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“I wonder how his life measured up against his dreams. Or if he still had dreams. Some of us have let ours go.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Water streams from the faucet for his final bath. A moment to wash and say good-bye to this skin that has held his soul. This skin he has probably loved and hated and mistaken for who he was.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“A mortician is an illusionist. The goal is to cushion reality, slow down how fast the hurt seeps in. Cuts are filled, the gray pallor painted over. Lips moistened with tinted cream. Hair washed and combed but not overly styled. The embalmer’s threads and glue and brushstrokes must be invisible so that when a family looks into the face of a loved one for the last time, there is no sign of illness, injury, or suffering. The grieving can pretend that their loved ones are merely sleeping. That they will hear you when you bend over to whisper all you had meant to say. We need these illusions. Need to pretend the funeral will bring comfort. Closure. We need friends and family members saying, We’ve got you. You won’t slip away into a black hole of grief. You won’t. Look at the body again. See? No signs that he suffered.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Sometimes I think of the town the way I think of Mr. Mosley pumped full of pink fluid. We want to fool ourselves. Pretend that our community is thriving. For all the effort neighbors put into keeping up the town, it seems that one roof tile and windowpane at a time is not worth replacing. Piece by piece, Petroleum is crumbling away. Even the asphalt on our town’s one paved road is cracked, full of shallow craters, and will soon return to dirt.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“They often stood clustered in town, demanding the dignity of work. You’d overhear their grumbling. They needed to do something with their hands. They needed something to fill the hours, something to talk about when they went home at the end of the day. Many developed strange ticks—rubbing their hands together and forgetting to stop, looking hard off to nowhere and not hearing if someone spoke to them. Whenever I saw these men in town, I’d walk way around them as I would a hot stove. By summer’s end, many had taken jobs as handymen, bartenders, short-order cooks, janitors, whatever was available—changes they probably thought were temporary.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams