Empty Bedroom Grieving

Death Is a Sad Thing. When it does happen, people tend to do things to deal with their grief in productive and not-so-productive ways. They may cry a lot, go to counseling, keep themselves busy, go through the Five Stages of Grief, or even use food and/or drink to deal with the pain.

Sometimes, they may keep the loved one's bedroom the exact same way as they left it or clean it up a bit to look pristine, especially in the case of a child's death. Other times, they may hang out in the bedroom to feel their presence or just shut down the bedroom and forbid other family members from entering the room out of their grief or in fear of someone else "desecrating" it.

Keep in mind that although death is the most common example of this trope, other factors may also come into play, including a missing loved one or a child or other loved one who went off to school or into the military (or less commonly, to prison or some other similar environment).

It may be used to provide a Tear Jerker moment. If it's used in a maladaptive fashion, then it could come off as Excessive Mourning, a Stalker Shrine, or Wangst. See also Empty Chair Memorial, Shrine to the Fallen, Empty Nest and Empathy Doll Shot. Compare/contrast with Bad Bedroom, Bad Life.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An ad for RSA Ireland's "Crashed Lives" featured an elderly woman going back in time while grieving her long-dead daughter, who died in a car crash due to her being distracted while driving. At one point, she is seen clutching a stuffed animal of hers and crying while lying in her abandoned bedroom.
• One early Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives ad had a middle-aged woman discuss how her teenage daughter was critically and permanently injured by a Drunk Driver. It ends with the woman sitting in her bedroom, hopeful that one day she will come home.
• The LTSA "Fading Families" ad shows both the abandoned bedrooms and entire homes of people killed due to drunk driving as well as their images disappearing from existing pictures.

Anime & Manga

• DARLING in the FRANXX: Miku, looking for a place to sulk, lets herself through an off-limits door in the Parasites' living quarters and finds an abandoned bunkroom, clearly used by Squad 13's predecessors. Despite never knowing them, the sense of mortality shakes Miku to her core. Once the rest of the team find her and help her calm down, they make a point of cleaning the room and replacing the long-wilted flowers, knowing full well that if they don't acknowledge the anonymous fallen Parasites, nobody will.
• In The Girl In Twilight, this turns out to be the true circumstances for Asuka's brother's room. She was keeping it the exact same way it was when he mysteriously disappeared, half because she doesn't want to think about the possibility of anything worse happening to him and half because she wants it to be nice when he returns home. Once she finally absorbs that he's never coming home and allows herself to properly grieve for him, she finally cleans out the room.
• Moriarty the Patriot: After The Final Problem, when Sherlock appeared dead and even had a funeral, Ms. Hudson kept his room in exactly the condition he'd left it with all of his possessions in place, only going in to change the sheets and dust. While she did discover he was alive at some point in his three years traveling abroad, the original purpose was clearly to mourn him, especially since she forsook three years of rent to keep his room intact.
• In the last episode of Tenchi Universe after the group went their separate ways, Tenchi looks in on the now-empty rooms of his house, taking it in about how much he truly missed the women in spite of how crazy they usually drove him.
• In ViVid Strike!, Rinne is shown sobbing at her grandfather's bed after a trio of bullies prevent her from being with him in his final moments.

Comic Books

• In Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja , Dr. Yagyu kept his son's room locked and intact after he died from pneumonia. He eventually opens the room and passes on his son's possessions after adopting John.

Films — Animated

• Big Hero 6: After Tadashi's sudden death towards the start of the film, his bedroom is left as it was, but with his hat now sitting on his bed. Baymax takes note of this, and asks Hiro (Tadashi's younger brother) where Tadashi is. Hiro has to break the news of Tadashi's death while closing the screen door to his late brother's bedroom.
• An Extremely Goofy Movie: After Max leaves for college, Goofy sadly looks around his almost empty bedroom and is crushed to see that he left his old teddy bear behind.
• Toy Story 3 has a subtle, downplayed example. Early on, as Andy finishes packing for college, his mother walks in to check on his progress. Upon seeing his almost-empty bedroom, she whispers "Oh..." and freezes, visibly upset, as Andy's imminent departure finally sinks in.

Films — Live-Action

• Early on in Arthur 2: On the Rocks, it's revealed that Arthur has the bedroom kept as it was in honor of Hobson. At the end, when Fairchild finally manages to display a sense of humor and plays a prank on Arthur, Arthur tells him to pack his things and vacate his quarters...so he can move into Hobson's room, symbolizing Arthur finding Fairchild a worthy successor to his dearest friend at last.
• In Breakthrough as John still remains in a deep coma, Joyce is constantly seen in his empty bedroom, tidying it up and finds herself lingering in it.
• Ghost in the Shell (2017). After discovering her backstory is Fake Memories, Major visits a woman who might actually be her mother, who keeps her 'deceased' daughter's room preserved. It contrasts with Major's own spartan apartment which lacks anything not required for her work or self-maintenance.
• In The Good Son, Susan keeps her toddler son Richard's room in the same condition and has photos of him on stands after he drowned in the bathtub. It is later revealed his older brother Henry killed him in a fit of rage after finding out his parents gave him one of his old toys.
• The Hunters (2015): Nandin isn't dead. But it's revealed that Bataa, who apparently hasn't seen his daughter in years, keeps her room just as she left it, with the girlish pink sheets and the stuffed animals and everything.
• In the Bedroom: After his son Frank's funeral, Matt goes into Frank's room to grieve.
• Two versions of Little Women use this trope after Beth dies:
  • In the 1978 TV version, Marmee finds Jo crying in Beth's empty bedroom. She asks if it would make her feel better to shut the room up, but Jo declines.
  • In Little Women (1994), the housekeeper Hannah scatters flower petals throughout Beth's empty bedroom: on her beloved piano, on the bed, and over her collection of dolls, which ends with Hannah sadly grasping the hand of Beth's favorite doll Joanna.
• In Minority Report, the room of Anderton's son has been kept as he left it, including stuffed toys sitting in the cupboard.
• Ordinary People: After Buck drowns in a boating accident, the Jarretts, or more specifically Beth, keep the room preserved to the point where she berates Buck's brother Conrad for entering the room and sitting on the bed.
• In Psycho, Norma Bates' room is kept in pristine condition, despite it turning out that her son Norman murdered her several years before.
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Mildred goes to the bedroom of her late daughter Angela and remembers her last conversation with her where they had a huge argument which ends with Angela storming out of the house and saying she hopes she gets raped on the way with Mildred yelling, "Yeah, I hope you get raped too." Unfortunately, Angela did get raped and murdered causing Mildred to regret what she had said to her.
• In Zack Snyder's Justice League, months after the death of Clark/Superman at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Lois is seen grieving by symbolically reaching out with her hand to the empty spot of her bed where Clark used to sleep.

Literature

• One Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul story had a girl who was abandoned by her mother due to her catering business being more important to her than her husband and two children. After she left, the girl went into her parents' room and specifically her mother's closet, and wrapped herself up in some of her left-behind clothing.
• The Closers: Rebecca Verloren's mother has left her room untouched — other than dusting — since her daughter's murder 17 years ago. This eventually proves crucial to the climax as detective Harry Bosch discovers a vital clue, a fingerprint, on the floorboards of Rebecca's bed.
• In Every Shiny Thing, Sierra's foster parents had a biological daughter who died of cancer at age eight. Since then, they've kept her room exactly the way she left it. No one is allowed in, making it the perfect place for Lauren and Sierra to hide their stolen goods.
• In The Great Divorce, one of the shades was an overbearing mother who made the rest of her family miserable with her favoritism for her son. Part of her Excessive Mourning after his death involved keeping his room completely untouched.
• It: Georgie's bedroom is empty and cold when Bill pays it a visit. Of course, It is all too happy to torment Bill, having a picture of Georgie wink at him.
• Keeper of the Lost Cities: For many years after the death of their daughter Jolie, Grady and Edaline kept her bedroom just the way she'd left it. Edaline would sometimes go into the room just to lie down in the bed.
• In the first book of Lockwood & Co., The Screaming Staircase, when Lucy Carlyle joins Lockwood & Co. and their headquarters at 35 Portland Row, she is warned by Anthony Lockwood against going into a certain forbidden room. Towards the beginning of the third book, The Hollow Boy this is revealed to have been the room of his sister, Jessica Lockwood, who was killed by a ghost from a pot that had been stored in the room, one of many such relics collected by his parents. With his parents dead as well, he has kept his sister's room preserved in the state it was in when she died, with her death-glow over the bed. In the final novel, The Empty Grave, he finally opens up to the others and begins investigating the various items stored in there so that they can make use of them. At the end of the novel, a spirit-gate is set up in the room for the group to escape to the Other Side in the wake of a ferocious attack by their enemies. In the aftermath, the death-glow fades and Lockwood decides to finally move forward and convert the room into a guest bedroom, showing that he has moved on from his sister's death.
• Mermaid (2011): After Princess Margrethe's mother died two years ago, the king banned anyone from entering her chambers except the maids who keep the rooms maintained just as they were when she was alive.
• Mouse (2017): After Anna Kinoshita died, her family got rid of her medical stuff and put away a few of her figurines, but otherwise left her room exactly as she left it - dozens of anime figurines on every surface, posters for Japanese bands, dozens of light novels and anime DVDs, stuffed anime creatures on her bed, and a bedside lamp shaped like a Japanese lantern. Anna is embarrassed when Mouse sees it.
• Alluded to in Phoenix and Ashes. When Reggie Fenyx comes home on medical leave, he finds that his mother preserved his room as it was when he left for World War I (though at least it got cleaned regularly). He muses that had he died in France, the room would have become his memorial.
  • An extra note should add it technically does function as such, since Reggie is no longer the same boy who left; that boy "died" in the trenches. War Is Hell indeed.
• Shatter the Sky: After Maren's girlfriend, Kaia, is taken away by agents of the emperor, Maren spends a while in her room mourning her before setting off on a quest to find her. Kaia's mother appears to be doing the same thing and allowed Maren her time to mourn in private.
• Siren Novels: After Justine's drowning, her family keeps her room the way she left it. In the fall, her mom even puts away her summer clothes and sets out her winter clothes in her closet.
• Stanley from When My Heart Joins the Thousand has left his mother's room untouched since her hospitalization and death from brain cancer. The only thing that's changed is the amount of dust.

Live-Action TV

• Archie Bunker's Place: Archie returns to the bedroom he shared with Edith for many years, which has largely been stripped clean since Edith's death, and breaks down crying upon seeing a slipper on the floor by the bed - the last thing of hers left in the bedroom.
• Arrow. When Oliver Queen comes back from the dead after five years Lost at Sea, his mother says his room is exactly as he left it as she never had the heart to change it (of course, the Queens live in a mansion so there's no shortage of rooms). Oliver however has changed himself, and she later finds him sleeping on the floor as he's no longer comfortable in the bed.
• In Broadchurch, the Latimers are reluctant to clear Danny's room for the new baby as they originally planned to keep it untouched.
• Charmed (1998): After Prue was killed off in the Season 3 finale, her room was kept as a shrine for the first several episodes of Season 4. When Paige moves into the room at the end of her sixth episode, it's used to show that Piper and Phoebe are beginning to move on.
• Discussed in Cleveland Abduction. After her and the other girls' rescues, Michelle Knight (Taryn Manning) discusses with her nurse how she doesn't wish to see her mother during her hospitalization. Unlike the other girls' mothers and families, she didn't bother to look for her even once in her decade of captivity and said how other families would keep messages from their children or keep their bedrooms exactly the same way even years after the fact.
• Coronation Street:
  • After Oliver's life-support system is withdrawn, Leanne goes back into his bedroom and cries her heart out.
  • After the death of his newborn son Jake and the suicide of his wife/Jake's mother Alison, Kevin returns to his son's empty nursery and first lingers in the room, then rips off the peeling wallpaper in his rage and grief before breaking down in tears.
• In Day Break (2006), the mother of Jane Doe kept her daughter's room the same way for all those 15 years since the murder. Plot point as it helps Hopper to find leads to who her murderer was.
• Doctor Who: The Classic Series plays with this. In the Fifth Doctor story "Terminus", it is revealed that Adric's room on the TARDIS has been untouched since his death at the end of "Earthshock", indicating that the Doctor has been unable to bring himself to jettison the room or at least put it to another use. However, when Tegan is asked to find sleeping quarters for new companion Vislor Turlough, she shows him to Adric's old room, suggesting that she is trying to remove painful reminders of Adric from the TARDIS.
• An episode of Dr. Phil had a grieving mother mourn for her thirteen-year-old daughter, who was killed in a car crash several years earlier. Unfortunately, her grief was so profound, that she not only would obsessively hang out in her room while barring other family members from entering but she also tried to blame her husband and the girl's stepfather for her death simply for taking the family on a drive that day.
• House of Anubis: Downplayed in Season 3 once everyone knows Nina isn't coming back. Amber wakes up on her birthday and is immediately saddened when she looks across the room and sees Nina's empty bed area, symbolizing how her best friend won't be there to celebrate with her anymore. Nina's empty bed is also where Fabian reads her breakup letter to him and promptly cries.
• A variation in the Mini Series "I Know My First Name Is Steven", where his father refused to paint over or repair the garage door that he had carved his name into shortly before he disappeared as if doing so would mean that he'd finally given up hope of him still being alive. It turned out he was right.
• Discussed in the "Homesick" episode of Law & Order. When a grieving mother is interviewed by detectives after the death of her eight-month-old son, she asks, "Do you want me to go home to an empty crib and lose my mind?"
• In The Leftovers, Nora keeps the room of her children as they left it and even renews the cereal boxes in the kitchen every so often.
• Midsomer Murders: One episode had a woman so devoted to her brother that she refused to let anyone into his room after his disappearance. The fact that she keeps his mummified body on the bed might have something to do with it.
• Once Upon a Time: In the Season 1 finale, after Henry has been saved from accidental poisoning and the curse has been broken, Regina is forced out of the hospital by all those who now remember she is the Evil Queen. Before she flees, she begs her adopted son to understand that, despite her evil deeds, she still loves him, then retreats back to the house, where she goes into his bedroom and cries into his pillow, grieving the fact that nothing will ever be the same between them again.
• Following the Tragic Stillbirth of her son, One Life to Live's Cassie would often sit in his nursery, even as she sincerely tried to pack away everything. Her husband sending over some friends to quickly empty it, sincerely believing that this would help her move on, instead ended up devastating her even more.
• In Pretty Little Liars, after Jessica DiLaurentis moves back into her old home, she sets up her daughter Alison's room as it was when Ali disappeared. Emily stays in Ali's room in this state for a while and finds the experience unsettling.
• The pilot of Runaways (2017) shows that the Minorus (particularly mama Minoru) keep Amy's bedroom as it was, and don't allow anyone to enter it (not even her sister Nico).
• In Star Trek: Picard episode "Nepenthe", we are shown that the Troi-Rikers have kept Thaddeus's room exactly as it was when he was alive.
• The Grand Finale of Still Standing has Bill and Judy preparing for their oldest son Brian to leave for college. They admit to not feeling all that sad about it and are actually looking forward to converting his bedroom into a space for them to use. But then, after they finish emptying the room by moving his dresser, they discover that the wall behind it has a crayon drawing of the family Brian made when he was a little boy. Judy breaks down as the reality of Brian going hits her, and Bill (himself holding back Manly Tears) holds her as she cries in his arms.
• Stranger Things:
  • Although Eleven is not dead at the beginning of series two, Mike keeps her Blanket Fort in the basement exactly as she left it because it is never too late to hope for her return.
  • Terry Ives also left the room intact that she created for Jane/Eleven. There's a heartwarming scene in Season 2 where Eleven comes to visit the place that was meant to be the center of her childhood.
• In The Umbrella Academy (2019), it's implied Five's room was kept up in the seventeen years following his disappearance. Reginald believed him to simply be missing in action.
• One Unsolved Mysteries case about a nineteen-year-old woman who was killed after leaving a Christmas party had her parents explain how they still left her bedroom open and clean, even years after her murder.
• This has often been seen in episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but in one case, Dr. Huang points out that the room has been updated to be age-appropriate, rather than frozen in time like most missing children's are, indicating that the mother sincerely believes that her child is still alive and that she'll find her eventually.
• Yellowjackets is about a group of teenage girl soccer players surviving the aftermath of a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and the lives of those few who survived the full 19 months in the wilderness 25 years later. Team captain Jackie Taylor is not among these survivors. In "Saints," Jackie's best friend Shauna and her husband Jeff visit the Taylor family home for an annual birthday brunch that the Taylors hold in honor of Jackie's memory. At one point, Shauna visits Jackie's bedroom and a flashback shows both of them together in the bedroom as teens, the room looking exactly as it does in the present.

Music

• Discussed in the song "Redecorate" by Twenty One Pilots, about a person who is about to die, but is wondering if they should either clean their room first or let their loved ones do it for them after they are gone.
• blink-182: "Adam's Song" is about a teen about to be Driven to Suicide, and has multiple lines discussing what the narrator's family will do after he's dead, including leaving his room empty as suggested by these two lines:
  You'll never step foot in my room again
  You'll close it off, board it up
• In Tim McGraw's "Can't Be Really Gone," the singer is in denial about what is heavily implied to the be death of his partner. He walks through the house, finding all of the things she loves, and is sure she wouldn't leave them behind, including the book she left in their bedroom.
  Her book is lying on the bed
  The two of hearts to mark her page
  Now who could ever walk away at chapter twenty-one?
  So she can't be really gone

Podcasts

• In In Strange Woods, Peregrine makes references to going into her dead brother Jacob’s room and being sad to find it empty.

Radio

• Bleak Expectations: Played for very dark humour when the second series states that Pip Bin kept the room of his first wife, Flora Diesearly, exactly as it was the day she died... to the extent that Flora's corpse hasn't even been moved from the bed she died in (and by inference, neither has the body of her governess, who died in the room as well).

Video Games

• In Dragon Age II, following the murder of their mother Leandra, Hawke refuses to change a single thing in her bedroom. Clicking on the door to her room (which is never shown) may prompt Hawke to make a comment about how they just can't bear to go through her things. This is even in the third act of the game, which takes place three years after her death.
• In the alternate timeline of Life Is Strange, paralyzed Chloe is moved downstairs, leaving her upstairs bedroom empty, with some memories being left boxed up.
• Early on, Sophia in Stardew Valley Expanded, keeps the room of her parents who died in a tragic car accident, as it is. It's not until her 7 heart event, when she starts to get over her depression, that she goes through their stuff, organizing and cleaning their room with the help of the player character.
• Deconstructed in What Remains of Edith Finch. The Finch family has for the longest time suffered from a perceived family curse that has resulted in the premature and tragic deaths of every single family member. The matriarch of the family, Edith "Edie" Finch, has made a habit of preserving the bedrooms and heirlooms of her family from the day they die. She actually erected a memorial for her father Odin, who died getting his family to America to escape the curse, before they even built a house (the travel had destroyed their old one). This obsession with death, as well as being surrounded by constant reminders of the people they lost, directly and indirectly resulted in the deaths of some family members, and eventually drove the last of Edie's family away. The game is following Edith Finch (Jr.) as she tries to document the full story of the family through the house in her journal, which ironically becomes her own dying gift to her son.

Visual Novels

• In all the mainline games of the Danganronpa series, a student's dorm is always permanently locked after they die. Checking the door to a student's room the chapter after they die causes the protagonist to make a comment regarding the student's fate.

Webcomics

• Of Mice and Mayhem: After the Rangers pick up on clues that hint Gadget died, they opt to leave her room the way it was on the night they went out on their ill-fated mission.

Web Originals

• This YouTube video, which was uploaded by I'm So Sorry Please Forgive Me.mp4 contains footage of a boy crying with disturbing video and sound effects.

Western Animation

• DOTA: Dragon's Blood: The Invoker has magically kept the bedroom of his and Selemene's daughter Filomena just as it was when she died... centuries ago.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily", where the Simpson children were sent to live with the Flanderses, Homer and Marge walk through the house sadly looking in on their deserted bedrooms, with Homer eventually going into Lisa's bedroom and playing with her "saxo-mo-phone".
  • Downplayed in "Bart on the Road". With Bart on the road with Milhouse, Martin, and Nelson, and Homer and Lisa having a sleepover at the Nuclear Power Plant, Marge only has Maggie keeping her company, shown by her walking past Bart and Lisa's empty bedrooms.
  • Downplayed with Ned Flanders. After Maude's untimely death, he kept the imprint of her silhouette in their bed, even obsessively spraying it with starch to remain fresh. By the end of "I'm Goin' To Praiseland", he lets it go as a symbol to move on with his life.

Real Life

• After Columbine victim Rachel Scott's murder, her family closed off her bedroom for a year, completely barring everyone from entering.
• Subverted in the Laci Peterson case: whereas her husband Scott claimed in a television interview that the bedroom of their unborn son Connor was closed until they both came home, saying it was "entirely too painful" to enter it. At his murder trial, it came out that he used the room as a storage closet after their disappearances/deaths.
• In an interview, Stan Lee and his wife Joan spoke about how after the death of their second daughter Jan in 1953 (only three days after she was born), they continued to maintain the bedroom they'd prepared for her.
• The second floor of Graceland, Elvis Presley's home, has been left practically untouched since the day he died and is not open to the public.
• After her beloved husband Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria had his bedroom left perfectly maintained but otherwise untouched for the next forty years, allegedly even ordering that servants should continue to deliver the daily hot water for his morning shave.
• Jimmy Savile kept his mother's bedroom and wardrobe exactly as it was when she died in 1972.
• After the mysterious and to this day unsolved disappearance of British teenager Andrew Gosden in 2007, his family kept his bedroom as he left it.
• Missing infant Sabrina Aisenberg's parents have continuously kept her bedroom clean, even over 20 years after her disappearance in 1997.
• In an interview with 48 Hours, the grandparents of murdered toddler Caylee Anthony, George and Cindy, allow images of the little girl's well-furnished bedroom on the program.
• Samantha Smith's mother specifically told the Associated Press that she "did not want to be one of those old ladies who keep museum rooms". She dismantled Samantha's room as soon as the scriptwriter for the (ultimately never picked up) Made-for-TV Movie about her daughter had written down notes about it.
• During the decade that Cleveland teenager Amanda Berry was missing, her mother and older sister initially maintained her bedroom as it was at the time of her 2003 disappearance until shortly after the mother's 2006 death. Her sister then moved out of their home (a duplex where Amanda and her mother lived upstairs and her sister lived with her own husband and children downstairs), finding it too painful to live there without them.
• After metal guitarist Randy Rhoads was killed in a plane crash while touring with Ozzy Osbourne his mother kept his bedroom locked up and untouched for over 30 years afterwards.

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