Skip to main content

Life & Mortality Quote by Nigella Lawson

"And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up"

About this Quote

Grief, Lawson suggests, is less a clean sequence than a traffic accident: sudden, disorienting, and full of secondary collisions. The genius of the line is how it refuses the tidy self-help arc where you process, heal, and “move on.” Instead, mourning is rendered as lived time: recursive, messy, and oddly physical. “In a funny way” isn’t a punchline so much as a coping tic, the small verbal shrug people use when pain is too intimate to dramatize. She’s letting irony do emotional labor without turning grief into a performance.

The intent feels practical, almost domestic: to normalize the way loss reappears. Each new death doesn’t merely add sadness; it reactivates old sorrow, and the mind can’t keep the files separate. “Pile-up” is a deliberately unliterary word - not elegiac, not spiritual - which makes it accurate. It implies there’s no single point of impact; there are multiple hits, multiple victims, and a sense of helplessness as events stack faster than you can respond.

Context matters with Lawson because her public persona trades in appetite, comfort, and the choreography of daily life. When someone associated with pleasure and nurture speaks this plainly about bereavement, the subtext is that grief isn’t an exceptional state reserved for tragedies; it’s woven into ordinary adulthood. The line also quietly rebukes the social expectation to mourn “correctly.” There is no correct. There is only accumulation, and the awkward, human humor that sometimes keeps you upright.

Quote Details

TopicLegacy & Remembrance
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Lawson, Nigella. (2026, January 18). And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-in-a-funny-way-each-death-is-different-and-17875/

Chicago Style
Lawson, Nigella. "And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-in-a-funny-way-each-death-is-different-and-17875/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-in-a-funny-way-each-death-is-different-and-17875/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Nigella Add to List
Nigella Lawson on the Layered Nature of Grief
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

United Kingdom Flag

Nigella Lawson (born January 6, 1960) is a Journalist from United Kingdom.

29 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Anne Sexton, Poet
Anne Sexton