Death

TarnishedPenny

Literotica Guru
Joined
Dec 4, 2017
Posts
6,395
So...

We use violence in our stories. We use poverty. We use social isolation. We use illness, including mental illness. There's a whole area more-or-less devoted to infidelity of someone close. Age and aging are fair ball. All these very negative things are common enough in our erotic works.

Has anybody successfully worked in death? I don't mean Daddy-died-when-I-was-very-young, just-mentioned-in-passing death, I mean something recent and somebody close, a demise leaving a major character deeply grieving.

Death would seem to be the ultimate damper on desire. Has anybody successfully overcome this?
 
Yes, death has been important to my life, having lost my children and wife.

I had a story a long time ago that was about a funeral and sex was an important part of it. In "The Strawberry Flower" there is a large part about a death. My next story is currently called "The Funeral" and it is about a death and the subsequent funeral. It has very little sex in it but I think it is funny. Sex doesn't associate with humour or dying usually. I also had a story that was rejected that had a death and the funeral in it. The story was difficult to write and the death was inevitable suicide. It was about my friend.
 
Yes, death has been important to my life, having lost my children and wife.

I had a story a long time ago that was about a funeral and sex was an important part of it. In "The Strawberry Flower" there is a large part about a death. My next story is currently called "The Funeral" and it is about a death and the subsequent funeral. It has very little sex in it but I think it is funny. Sex doesn't associate with humour or dying usually. I also had a story that was rejected that had a death and the funeral in it. The story was difficult to write and the death was inevitable suicide. It was about my friend.

I look forward to reading that.

Thanks to all. Things to think on, surely.
 
Death and grieving are frequent elements in my stories. I use "grief" as a keyword, but I don't think I've used "death" as a tag.
 
Oshaw's Grief: A marriage falls apart as their child is dying.

"Spouse dies, and surviving spouse has to figure out if they were having an affair/deal with feelings over their affair" is also a LW trope that's shown up in a few stories. (See, e.g., Slirpluff's The Ties That Bind Us, DG Hear's I Need to Know)

GirlInTheMoon's If: Wife has to decide whether to reconcile with her husband who had an affair with her (now dead) best friend, and wonder what would have happened if she hadn't died.

RedHairedAndFriendly's Fucked Up Circumstances: Vulnerable woman goes drinking after getting bad news. (Dubcon/noncon. Dark.)

DreamCloud's The Rehab: A dying man falls in love.
 
Last edited:
If you have life, then there must be death sooner or later. The whole circle within a circle type thing. Making death sexy sounds like a good challenge.
 
In "Tamsin of Sky Village" the male antagonist died violently at the hands of the female protagonist. In a future rewrite they will both die.

In "The Third Ring" the female protagonist was murdered by her jealous sister and her grieving husband sacrificed himself to create a monument to his wife.

In part 1 of "A Valentine's Day Mess" two gangsters who intended to rape and murder the female protagonist were killed by a cougar (the God of hunters and warriors) unexpectedly summoned from the spirit world.

In part 2 of "A Valentine's Day Mess" one of the female protagonists witnessed the execution-style murder of her husband -- part of the genocide that virtually obliterated her culture.

In part 3 of "A Valentine's Day Mess" the antagonist murdered the male protagonist's downstairs neighbor. The male and female protagonists grieved for her in the penultimate scene of the story, and were transported to a spirit world where they could comfort each other without physical limitations.
 
Death is addictive. Rewriting a story I decided to kill off one of the characters. Before long the body count was two accidental deaths and a suicide for good measure. May not work in every story, though.

rj
 
Has anybody successfully worked in death? I don't mean Daddy-died-when-I-was-very-young, just-mentioned-in-passing death, I mean something recent and somebody close, a demise leaving a major character deeply grieving.

Death would seem to be the ultimate damper on desire. Has anybody successfully overcome this?

I used it in my series "A Stringed Instrument": examining how a closeted relationship complicates grieving for a close relative, and vice versa.
 
I've used a 'Dead All Along' plot in my very sad Romance story 'Learning to Love Louise', where one of the three main characters is revealed to have been dead 16 years, appearing only in the subconscious of one of the other characters.
 
True story, from those you probably would quickly dismiss in fiction as too cheesy.

A man wandered through graveyard, and to his surprise saw a fresh stone with his name on it. Well, the birth date was different. But it piqued his curiosity enough he went back another day. There was a young beautiful woman, in deep grief, the widow. Long story short, they fall in love, and married. For her, second husband by the exact same name. And, you probably guessed, he died.
 
So...

We use violence in our stories. We use poverty. We use social isolation. We use illness, including mental illness. There's a whole area more-or-less devoted to infidelity of someone close. Age and aging are fair ball. All these very negative things are common enough in our erotic works.

Has anybody successfully worked in death? I don't mean Daddy-died-when-I-was-very-young, just-mentioned-in-passing death, I mean something recent and somebody close, a demise leaving a major character deeply grieving.

Death would seem to be the ultimate damper on desire. Has anybody successfully overcome this?

In my series, Mary and Alvin, the death of Alvin's first wife, Bonnie, and the obstacle his lingering grief presents in his relationship with Mary, is a major theme.
 
I have a story that the protagonist dies in end. I also have another story, not posted here, where the wife of the protagonist dies suddenly and violently half way through the story. Those who have read it said they liked it very much.

I have killed off various character in other stories... but they were mainly spear carriers or in Star Trek parlance - red shirts.

The death of a loved one is tough to write... It almost always bring back memories that cause the pain to be experienced again. Yeah, it's a story. But a lot of my stories are based on real people, that I have known for a long, long time. A lot of them no long enjoy the comforts or excruciating pain of life. :heart:
 
My wife and her cousin are researching their family history. Sometimes that includes walking around graveyards looking for a particular grave. If the graveyard is staffed we can ask the staff, some of whom are very interesting individuals who chose to work in graveyards for a variety of reasons.

If there are no staff, we can ask other people in the graveyard. Once we met some very distant relations also looking for the same grave.

My wife and I went to a particular village church looking for my maternal ancestors from the early 1800s. They had an unusual surname and it was a small village so we expected any gravestones with that surname to be relevant. What we didn't expect was that the first 30 graves were my ancestors. A church warden told me that the family still lived in the village but had taken their children to Disneyland that week. The current family shared an ancestor with me who died in 1745 so the connection was very remote but we did find out how the surname was said aloud, not the way we would have expected.
 
My wife and I went to a particular village church looking for my maternal ancestors from the early 1800s. They had an unusual surname and it was a small village so we expected any gravestones with that surname to be relevant. What we didn't expect was that the first 30 graves were my ancestors.

Almost ten years after we moved into our current place (several hours' drive away from where I grew up) I found out that my great-great-grandmother and -grandfather are buried in a graveyard less than ten minutes' walk from my front door. No headstone though, they were too poor for that. But judging by the names on other graves, the place is full of my distant cousins.
 
Back
Top