Parenting & Family Quote by William Gibson

Grief in this line is less obituary than autopsy: Gibson is dissecting a loss that happens in plain sight, the quiet death of a version of a person. The speaker isn’t mourning a body but a “corner” of the self that depended on the child staying a child. That turn is the gut-punch. It admits what polite parenting narratives dodge: a kid’s growing up can feel like a theft, not because the child has done anything wrong, but because adulthood closes a door you didn’t realize you were living behind.

The phrasing does sly work. “For years I have been mourning” suggests a long, private ritual, the kind that can coexist with everyday function. “Not for my dead” rejects the culturally sanctioned script of grief, then replaces it with something harder to name. The boy becomes a mirror; the real casualty is the parent’s own emotional geography. “Whatever corner in my heart died” is deliberately imprecise, as if the speaker can’t bear to inventory the exact attachment that’s gone: tenderness, authority, usefulness, the illusion of protection.

Then comes the kinetic cruelty: “his childhood slid out of my arms.” Childhood doesn’t march away; it slips, like water or a dream you wake up losing. The image turns caregiving into failed containment, a reminder that love can’t freeze time. Coming from Gibson, a writer obsessed with the way futures arrive before we’re ready, the line feels like low-tech cyberpunk: the inevitable upgrade that costs you intimacy, and the parent left holding empty air where a simpler version of the world used to be.