MEDVIEDENKO
Why do you always wear mourning?

MASHA
I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.

"When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.

I'm in mourning for my life.

Like love, mourning affects the world — and the worldly — with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.

I’ll mourn how I mourn. Everyone’s different.

To raise the veil.
To see what you're saying goodbye to.

I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner.

The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. “But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness…. To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.