I can never read Robin Hobb's
Assassin's Quest and the later
Tawny Man trilogy without breaking into tears. I just... feel so touched with the sense of FitzChivalry's loss, and how... well, not gonna give any spoilers. It's just a very, very sad aspect of the story.
The ending of the
Doctor Who episode "Planet of the Ood". Not really sad, but it still gets my teary-eyed every single time.
The song 'Vaari-vainaan kannel' ('Kannel of Grandfather Departed') by the Finnish trad/gospel band Suomalainen messu ('Finnish Mass'). I couldn't find the song on YouTube, but it's a sad ballad of a
kantele, a kind of Finnish harp, found in the attic. The singer accounts how his grandmother tells its story: during the Winter or Continuation War, her husband was fighting in the front. In a letter he tells he will come home for a two-week leave, and with him he will bring a kannel to their young son. The son waits eagerly, watching at the road each day... but it is not the father who returns, but a message telling that he had died in combat.
Following the war, the son never learned to play the kannel, having "to bury his pain in his heart", "hands forced to labour when the peace came", an allusion to the heavy war reparations Finland had to pay. The kannel is forgotten, left in the attic unplayed. The song ends with the grandmother taking the kannel in her lap: "Grandma gently hummed, fingers softly playing, dear grandfather's thankful song to God". But it's the very final stanzas that always make me cry:
Löytäisinkö vielä sen,
kiitollisen sävelen,
kuulisitko Herra,
vaarivainaan ja Suomen maan?
'Could I still find,
that thankful tune,
Would You hear, O Lord,
Grandfather departed and this far Finland?'
It does not translate well... But still... I never consider myself a religious man, but something in those words just touches my heart so deeply that I can never keep the tears away. It is a feeling that has grown sharper along the years, what with my own grandfather, who fought in the war, slowly losing his mental capacities to Alzheimer. I've not gone to see him in the old people's home. I admit being a douche that way, but... seeing this dear old man I respected and loved as a child, a man who came back from the war broken but unbeaten, and raised two great sons... be only a weeping, confused shell of his former self, not recognizing even his sons or understanding that his wife has died... I just couldn't take it.