I can’t believe someone else remembers this! It always made me cry, too. But I remember it as a cartoon that always seemed to go along with the Garfield Christmas special. The cat was white, right? And it lived until she grew up and got married or something like that and of course ended up dying of old age, I think. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that. 
Heh, I’m a 30 year old man and I still have (somewhere) ragged old teddy bears from my first Christmas and other old toys that I could never throw away because they were gifts from loved ones.
Old men alone make me sad too, even though often it may be by choice - when my Dad started getting worse mentally he would frequently spend all day sitting on the couch in his bedroom, away from everybody else, just staring off into nothingness. We’d ask him if he’d like to come in the living room with the rest of us, and he’d say he was fine where he was.
Damn, crying again. I need to stay away from this thread. Won’t someone with a lot of money build a big ranch for all the abandoned animals, old men, and plush toys to stay at?
reading letters by people i know, not always to me, where they talk about goals they have that have not, or will never come true.
photos of my parents when they were young.
old people alone
when i was a kid id get sad if I got a present I didnt really like and it sat there unused…id feel guilty and sad
any animal stray on the streets
a very bright sunny day in the middle of a paralyzingly cold winter, around 4pm with the sun just going down…
an empty school after everyone has gone home
that feeling you get when a good party is winding down
the smell of an improperly aired house that has been freshly painted
sundays
Interesting you should say this. When I was a little boy (2ish, 3ish), I had this children’s music box. I don’t remember what it looked like or sounded like or anything. All I know is that it would play a sad song, and me, as a little kid, would open it and listen to the sad song and cry. I did this all the time.
Eventually, my parents waited until I wasn’t paying attention and tossed it out in the garbage because they figured it probably wasn’t doing my mental state as a three year old much good to sit around and cry to sad songs. I barely remember any of this, but my mom tells me about it from time to time.
Holy shit, Mudshark and Kn*ckers. I can’t even watch that commercial without crying/wanting to cry. I came into this thread all excited because I had the one thing I was sure no one else would post - unexplained sadness from the Zoloft commercial. But I’m strangely comforted by the fact that I’m not the only one…all of my friends laugh at it. Poor Egg Thing.
Weird things that makes you sad?!
THIS DAMNED THREAD
Crying, now…
Old men and women alone at resaurants always make me sad. It makes me think that their spouse died if they are eating alone.
The thought of being utterly alone all day. When I go to my grandma’s house to take her something and she’s sitting alone at her exquisite meal that only she will get to see and enjoy.
I remember one time when I was 9 or 10, my mom took me and my friend out of town. We went to Hobby Lobby. My friend and I, mischevious as we were, pulled some rubber grapes off these fake grape vines and took them out into the lobby, proceeding to throw them at each other and laugh. We noticed an old man sitting on a bench watching us and smiling. We were kind of weirded out and told my mom the old man was watching us. “Amy, he’s smiling. This is probably the most fun he’s had in a long time.” she said to me. I still think about that.
The song “Every Once in a While” by Blackhawk.
The video for Brad Paisley’s “I Wish You’d Stay”. It shows a wedding, the bride and groom and everyone else obviously having a blast. Then the camera moves into another room, where the father of the bride is sitting, looking at pictures of his little girl. He looks up at the camera and has tears in his eyes. God, I’m getting teary already. This song really hits me hard, because in less than a year, a very important person in my life will be moving away from me.
“I’m sorry for still holding on. I’ll try to let go, and I’ll try to be strong.” - Brad Paisley
I thought of another thing. A specific clothing item I saw at the thrift shop.
A white sweatshirt, cut down the middle. The cut was hemmed, and there were button holes on one side and buttons on the other. On the front, on each side, an intricate pattern of flowers. It appeared to be ironed on, and then outlined and detailed with puffy paint. Obviously hours of work.
I envisioned a small old lady, bent over her kitchen table, outlining the flowers with puffy paint. The next day, she gives the finished product to her daughter. Daughter squeals with delight and gives her mother a hug.
Next day, on her way to work, daughter takes a detour to the thrift store. The shirt becomes a 50 cent bargain on the sale rack.
The smell of lilacs. (I don’t know why; I’ve felt that way about them ever since I was a little kid.)
George Harrison songs.
Wal-Mart.
A little knitted mouse, called Andrew, that my ex sent me for Valentine’s day a couple of years ago, and which I carried halfway around the world that summer. He’s sitting on top of the computer now, because I don’t know what else to do with him and I don’t want to put him away. Not yet. There’s also a letter from the woman who knitted him somewhere on this desk. (She lives in a place called Malton, in Yorkshire, and I’ve never met her; I left some photos of the mouse on its travels with one of her co-workers, and she wrote to me to say thanks. The letter arrived September 10, 2001; I forgot all about it the next day – for obvious reasons – and there seems no particular reason to answer it now.)
Anything having to do with the mentally handicapped not comprehending what’s going on in the world–stuff like death, birth, etc–makes me tear up. I guess it’s from having a few mentally handicapped children in my neighborhood while I was growing up, and my parents explaining to me why they can’t go to school with me, etc–to me it just seemed sad that they couldn’t experience what I was enjoying so much, and never could.
BTW, that story’s had me weeping for the past 10 minutes–I just can’t get over the fact that the couple couldn’t understand why the baby wouldn’t eat, and why couldn’t someone sit down and teach them about how to care about it.
When I see an old guy alone and his shirt is wrinkly or his pants are too long. Or an old lady with her wig on askew. I think about their missing partners and how they would have fixed that for them and I feel terrible.
I am traumatized when I have to sell a car. I always give it a little pat, thank it for carrying me to so many places and nothing personal, buddy.
In the fridge at church, there was a happy birthday cake for someone turning eight. I daydreamed about pushing my hand into the center of the cake and smearing it around. All of a sudden, even though I definitely hadn’t intended to do anything, I felt extremely guilty and sad. I still do.
The other day, I was listening to an upbeat musical on CD and realized that the lead actress must be pretty old by now. I looked her up on Google and found out she died two years ago. (But she had seemed so alive just a minute ago!)
I saw a family eating at a restaurant last weekend. Probably eight people in total. At the end of the table was an old woman in a wheelchair shaking violently, obviously being ignored. After they were finished, a middle-aged man said to (I presume) his wife, “Let’s take the kids to the car and come back for [jerks thumb toward old woman] her later.” So they left. For some reason the table they had been sitting at was moved to a different part of the room, so now the old woman was just sitting by herself, shaking, with a napkin in her hand that she was obviously trying to place somewhere. We were leaving at the same time, and while I awkwardly stood aside, my mom asked her if she needed any help. The old woman slowly put the napkin into her hand, very quietly said “thank you,” and smiled. That was all incredibly sad.
This is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. I think I’ll go read The Velveteen Rabbit to my stuffed animals to cheer myself up. (Moves off, sobbing)
I’ll get incredibly sad over watching anything to do with space - because I know there’s a lot out there we’re missing and will probably never discover, at least in my lifetime. And that makes me sad.
Also people complaining about food upsets me for some reason - if I’m in a resturant and someone is unhappy with what they’ve gotten it’ll spoil the whole outing for me.
There is a certain shade of sunlight, mid-afternoon in the summer, that just brings this black cloud of unhappiness around me. I don’t know why.
Also, the song “You Are My Sunshine” always makes me sad. My mother used to sing it to me gleefully when she found out how much it annoyed me–I got annoyed because it made me sad, but I’m not sure she understood. I’m not sure why the song made me so sad; it’s not as though the bits I ever heard were terribly depressing. Though when I Google the lyrics it seems my gut feeling about the damn song was right.
Other things that make me sad-
I had an old remote control car as a child. I carefully read the instruction manual as getting a gift like this had the same magnatude as a bicycle. In the manual’s list of “dont’s” it would have anime-ish pictures of a little remote control car with a face enduring all sorts of fates- drowning in a puddle (do not operate near water) getting confused/lost (do not drive the car out of your field of vision) and worst of all, getting RUN OVER BY A REAL CAR (do not operate near traffic). This mortified me. Poor little car! I probably took better care of that toy than any other toy I had. (it lasted like 2 years before the motor burned out)
Something that made MANY dopers sad- someone posted a link a while back of this little flash movie of a singing kitten sitting in a box (presumably waiting to be adopted). At the end of the song, there is a fade out and when it fades in it is wintertime and the box is shut, the kitten gone (I try to comfort myself into believing the kitten actually went off on its own to follow its dreams; there are paw prints visible in the snow after all. And there is another short movie bit of the kitten doing stunts with a soccer ball, so I would imagine kitty went on to become a famous soccer player…or something)
This makes me so sad! The elderly are often treated so badly or just simply ignored. They are still human beings capable of feeling and it just makes me mad and sad that people (especially family members) won’t take the small amount of extra time to make them feel comfortable and loved.
That Zoloft commerical is pretty depressing, but the worst commercial I ever saw was for some sort of product that was meant to replace irons. It featured a bunch of spotlit irons with big sad eyes, crying quietly to themselves because they now had no purpose in life. Oh, man, I’m crying now.
When I worked at McDonald’s, we had a lot of very elderly customers that were just so wonderful to interact with, even if I never saw them more than once or twice. They almost invariably would make my day much brighter.
But the thing that just nailed me in the heart was when one of them would buy a soft-serve ice cream cone. They would order it… a small one, costing less than a dollar, then count the change out so slowly and carefully. I would start thinking about what it would be like to have nobody to buy ice cream with but yourself, but you don’t care if people think you’re pathetic because you’ve lived a long full life and just want to sit down with a bit of ice cream and rest your feet for a little bit…
I would always end up in the storage room, pretending to get napkins or something while I dried my eyes. It reminds me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: “Growing old is not a tragedy.”
Stuffed animals are a tear-jerker, too. I have to go read “God Bless The Gargoyles” again, that’s a very Velveteen Rabbit sort of book, especially when the gargoyles are crying.
Seeing an old person I know in a photo taken when they were young. They always look so optimistic and cheerful and certain that they won’t end up as the old person I know them to be. And I think, good heavens, will I look that dated, that quaint, and that irrelevant someday?
I also can’t look at a baby without thinking somehow that “That child is going to grow old and die someday.” I hate that feeling.
Many things, cause I’m a nostalgic sappy person.
Thinking about Miami, because I had a bad experience there 2 years ago.
Thinking about New Hampshire, because I had a wonderful experience there that made me think the world was a beautiful, peaceful, amazing place. I went there 2 weeks before September 11 2001.
People named Jason, because one of them destroyed/altered my life drastically a year ago to the point where I no longer understand.
Thinking about this time last year, when I was in NY and the guy I loved was in Japan. And we’d talk on the phone every single night for SIX HOURS!!! crying and missing and loving eachother. This makes me horribly sad to remember because since moving here and marrying him, it’s never been that beautiful or romantic since.
Thinking about Minnesota because that’s where my father is and I miss him.
Any book or movie that deals with characters seeking love.
Anthing dealing with sad lonely children who have wonderful adults adopt/help them.