Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me.
When my dad died, I developed a nervous habit. He was very shy and quiet, and I was like him.
My father never wanted me to be a writer. He didn't - he came to terms with it maybe two years before he died. He wanted me to be a weather girl because when I was growing up, there were very few Latinas on television, and in the early '70s when you first started seeing Latinas on TV, they would be the weather girls.
When I read 'Rocky V,' it was a terrific story, a great script. Rocky died at the end. He has this devastating fight with Tommy Gunn, ends up in an ambulance with his head in Adrian's lap, and by the time they get to the hospital, he's dead.
It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end.
I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time.
Sammy Sosa grew up without a father in the back of a converted public hospital in San Pedro de Macoris, a dusty seaside town in the Dominican Republic. His father, Juan Montero, died when Sosa was 5.
Until I was 21, I wasn't going into the media. I was a professional show jumper; I was going to have a farm... Then my father died, and it changed my life. I realised I had to have a go at being a journalist to see if I could cut the mustard.
I died. Which is fantastic, because I have died already; I have been there and come back. I am completely recovered, thank you.
At the New York Harvard Club, they've moved the memorial for those who died in World Wars I and II up to an obscure little hallway; they used to be in the main hall, in the most prominent location. The sacrifice of those young people I always found so stunning and so admirable.
My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'
I would have loved to record with Paul McCartney on some of his early solo recordings, wonderful music. Playing some lovely organ, perhaps. I would have loved to record with John Lennon. He was a dear friend. I had lunch with him just two days before he died.
When my father died, I was 21, and he'd been sick for a few years. He changed during his illness. He kind of softened during it.
For example, when my mother died, the people who showed up just to put an apron on to cook, people who really do the right thing, so to speak, as my momma would always say to show that they care, a sense of community that we've lost so much in our country.
Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.
I haven't died in a movie in a while,'The Departed,' 'Body of Lies,' 'Revolutionary Road,' 'Shutter Island' and 'Inception.' I guess I did die in 'The Departed.'
I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.
The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force.
I have got to the point in my life when a lot of people I know have died or are dying, so I realise that somewhere outside the pearly gates is a queue, shuffling nearer and nearer to the celestial box office.
My mom died when I was 11 years old.
I wasn't going to get such a nice car - I was going to get a cute little hybrid or something, keep the trees happy - but then my grandfather died, and it was all: retail therapy!
In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience.
Every kid who hated grownups becomes a grownup. Well, except the ones who died.
My late wife - she died of cancer. We tried everything we could do to save her. I wish that I could have done more and that I could have been with her at the moment she passed away. I couldn't be in that room because I knew it would be so devastating that I wouldn't be able to take care of the kids after.
In 1989, my father died after a prolonged struggle with Alzheimer's disease. All four of his siblings followed him into the shadow lands of that fascinating, maddening affliction.
Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 - struck by a falling telephone pole.
Kadar died as a mass killer, and the Hungarian nation can't forget that.
My father died when I was 11. He was a vaudeville comedian. He worked in one movie, 'Ladies of the Chorus,' as Marilyn Monroe's father.
My mother did play classical piano, not that well. And actually, my father sang with the big bands - he sang with Bob Crosby's band - but he had to give up show business when his father died. He had to come back to Montgomery and take over the furniture store.
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.
I once tried to raise two tomato plants, and they died in spite of the fact I fertilized them every morning. Duh.
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
My mother died of a stroke in 1974, and for a long time, I blamed myself. She was utterly devastated when I told her I was a lesbian not long before.
I consider the most important period of my life, from March 3rd, 1987, I think it was, to March 26th, 1995: the day I met Eazy-E and the day he died. To me, that was the most important period of my life, of my career, and the part that I am most proud of.
I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.
I nearly died of double bronchial pneumonia at the age of five.
