Life & Mortality Quote by Julian Clary

Clary takes a sentiment that could easily slide into Hallmark mush and spikes it with the one detail you can’t sanitize: smell. The line starts like a gentle corrective to the tidy cultural script of grief ("they’re gone, move on") and then swerves into something awkwardly intimate. “Smell his smell” is almost childlike in phrasing, but that’s the point: grief isn’t eloquent. It’s sensory, irrational, and stubborn. You don’t remember a dead person like a biography; you remember them like a hallway, a coat, a room you walked into and instantly knew who’d been there.

As a comedian, Clary also understands the stealth power of specificity. The joke isn’t a punchline so much as a controlled discomfort. Smell is private, bodily, and faintly comic because it refuses the polished language of memorials. It undercuts any performance of dignified mourning, replacing it with an image that’s both tender and slightly absurd: a grown adult admitting that the dead return, not as ghosts, but as lingering scent.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that time “heals” by erasing. Twenty-five years later, it’s not over because it was never a clean event; it’s an ongoing relationship with absence. Clary makes that feel true by choosing the least philosophical proof imaginable. Memory isn’t an argument. It’s a smell you can’t un-smell.