Examples of Tragic Keepsake in Literature.
- Angel Child, Dragon Child: Ut keeps a matchbox with a photograph of her mother on the inside of the lid. Downplayed because her mother is not dead, and merely separated from the rest of the family by distance, but Ut misses her just as much.
- Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World: The locket that Karan carries was purchased by the leader of her former team and acts as a symbol/reminder of what happened to her. Nick accidentally breaks it during a job but she doesn't care, symbolizing her beginning to move on from the betrayal and trusting her new teammates.
- Apollo Autism: Jake's parents died in a car accident when he was twelve. He still has two of their favorite possessions, an angel figurine from his mother and a catcher's mask from his father.
- In the Belgariad prequel Polgara the Sorceress, Polgara keeps a hairbrush used by one of her friends, who was killed as an indirect result of her interference in Arendish politics, for over two thousand years.
- In Bud, Not Buddy, Bud's prized possessions include some rocks with city names and dates carved on them that he found in his mother's drawer after she died. She used to collect them before she ran away. Her father has boxes of them that she didn't take with her.
- From the Deryni books: Sidana's wedding ring. Kelson wears it on his little finger until he gives it to Rothana (as an unofficial betrothal ring) before leaving on his quest. When Rothana learns Kelson and Dhugal are missing, she throws it into the palace moat. After his return, Kelson has it retrieved. A few years later, when he decides to propose to Araxie, he melts it down and gives the gold to Bishop Arilan, asking him to have a new ring made for her.
- In the Discworld series, there is a troll watchman named Detritus who is very slow as his silicon brain works slower in higher temps. His specially made cooling-helmet has a fan to help cool his mind and was given to him by the Dwarf Cuddy who died a short time after giving Detritus the present.
- A Drowned Maiden's Hair: Maud's brother Samm'l, who was adopted away from her after their mother died when she was five and he was eleven, tracks her down at her new home in Hawthorne Grove. He has to go west with his adopted family, but before he leaves, he gives her a keepsake from their Catholic mother - a coral rosary with a silver crucifix. Hyacinth steals the rosary after the House Fire. Maud never sees it again.
- Earth's Children:
- The cloak Ayla used to carry her infant son becomes this for her at the end of the first book. She only takes it with her to remind herself of him after she's forced to leave him and she sometimes holds it close to her for comfort. She eventually leaves it behind in the third book, when she accepts she will probably never see him again; she uses it to wrap the body of a young boy who reminds her of her son.
- Jondalar has two notable ones:
- A necklace belonging to his sister-in-law, Jetamio, which he keeps to remind himself of her and his brother after they both die. He keeps it with him until he reaches his home again and then passes it on to his mother.
- He keeps a piece of opal that falls from the rock pile his brother is buried under, which Ayla says he should keep in his amulet, as it may be a sign from his brother's spirit. It becomes a Memento MacGuffin in the fifth book, involving a subplot where Jondalar uses it in a ritual to contact Thonolan's spirit and ensure he moves onto the afterlife.
- In The Mammoth Hunters, Crozie been holding on to a white cape she made specially for her son for years. He never got to wear it because of his untimely death but Crozie couldn't bear to either throw it away or give it to someone else. She eventually decides to give it to Ayla for Racer to wear, so that people at the Summer Meeting won't mistake him for an ordinary horse and try to harm him. Crozie insists she use so it won't be wasted and out of gratitude for everything Ayla has done for the Crane Hearth.
- In False Memory by Dean Koontz, Dr. Ahriman has his father's eyes in a jar. Not as a reminder of some past wrong, however, but rather because he killed his father and stole his father's eyes in an attempt to understand his own inability to cry and subsequent fetish for tears.
- Forbidden: For Maya, the silver bracelet Lochan gave her for Christmas, engraved, “Maya, love you forever. Lochan x." becomes this.
- Forbidden Sea: Since Adrianne's father died two years ago, the only valuable her family didn't sell is a pendant that belonged to him, and before that belonged to his grandmother.
- Gracefully Grayson: Grayson's mother was an artist. She left her a painting of a red, blue, and yellow bird flying above the earth. Grayson learns that the painting is of the phoenix, a creature Grayson was fascinated by when she was little.
- In The Hardy Boys Casefiles, Joe's girlfriend Iola is killed by a car bomb meant for them in the very first chapter of the very first book. Throughout the rest of the series, he's occasionally seen wearing the melted keys she was holding around his neck.
- Harry Potter:
- In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Harry leaves the Dursleys' house for good and discards most of his possessions, he keeps with him the fake Horcrux that Dumbledore had all but died helping him retrieve from the cave. This is also an example of the hero not keeping the keepsake; instead, Harry gives it to Kreacher, an act that results in the house-elf that had loathed Harry and his friends becoming one of his most loyal allies. This of course being because the locket is a tragic keepsake for Kreacher of someone else entirely.
- It is revealed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that whenever Neville goes to see his parents who were tortured so much they lost their memories, including that they have a son, they give him a gum wrapper before he leaves the hospital. While his grandmother tells him to just throw it away, he has kept every wrapper they have ever given to him.
- In His Dark Materials, Will Parry grew up hearing tales about his brave father, the explorer, and was told by his mother that he would grow up to "take on his father's mantle." He does this quite literally. (However, it's not made explicit how long he keeps or wears the mantle itself.)
- H.I.V.E. Series: Wing wears half of a yin/yang symbol around his neck, and his mother had the other half. He knows she wasn't wearing it when she died, and assumes that whoever murdered her has the second amulet. Turns out it was just Nero, to whom she sent it a few days before her death so that the two halves would remain separated. Neither of them know that they each contain half of Overlord's source code.
- In I Heard That Song Before, Jonathan Lansing always wore his late wife Annie's silver locket, which contained a photograph of him, Annie and their baby Kay. It was lost after Jonathan went missing. When his body is found, he's still wearing the locket, which is cleaned up and given to his daughter. Kay then begins wearing it herself.
- In The Lady Grace Mysteries, Grace often wears a pearl and diamond ring, which belonged to her late mother; her mother died when she was twelve after drinking poisoned wine meant for Queen Elizabeth I.
- Legacy of the Dragokin: Lydia carries around a teddy bear scorched from the fire that burned her home down because her mother died retrieving it.
- Anthony from Love Anthony used to collect white pebbles and line them up all over the house. Now Olivia keeps them in a bowl on her coffee table.
- Livvie from Livvie Owen Lived Here carries the kitten collar of Orange Cat, who escaped and was hit by a car, everywhere she goes. She usually wears it as a bracelet.
- Zack keeps a gift from his former girlfriend during his time in prison in The Mental State. However, this is actually a subversion, as he actually bought it himself to trick the other inmates into thinking he had a weakness.
- In Mockingjay the pearl Peeta gave her serves as this for Katniss.
- Navigating Early: In the story Early tells, Pi returns to his Doomed Hometown to find nothing left of his family except a shell necklace his mother made. He carries it around for the rest of his travels.
- One-Third Nerd: Dodge's grandmother Lily died four years ago. Since then, his grandfather Crash has worked to keep all her plants alive. He also won't throw out anything that has her name on it, causing the table to be buried under a mound of junk mail.
- The first thing protagonist Sonya Kantor does in Poster Girl after being able to leave the ghetto where she has been locked up for the last ten years is to return to the ruins of her family home and gather some items so she finally can have some reminders of her dead loved ones.
- Prudence Penderhaus: Ever since Prudence's dad died five years ago, her mom has kept a stash of his stuff in the back of their closet. It comes in handy after Mrs. Shooster throws out all of Cassius's belongings, including his clothes, and Prudence lends him some of her dad's clothes.
- Patrick from Rubbernecker takes good care of his bicycle because it's the only thing he inherited from his father, who died when he was eight. Until the villain hits him with his car, wrecking the bike.
- In Sweet Silver Blues, Garrett identifies where Denny Tate kept his secret papers because they're wrapped in a cavalry horse blanket, which he knew Denny valued as a reminder of his military service and of friends who hadn't made it home. Averted by Garrett himself, who dropped his seabag in the harbor the day he left the Marines, not wanting to retain any reminders of a pointless war with which he'd grown utterly disgusted.
- Garrett does play this one straight in and after Old Tin Sorrows, with the portrait of Eleanor.
- Zilpha Keatley Snyder loves this. In Season Of Ponies, Pamela spends the summer with an otherworldly friend and his herd of ponies; at summer's end he does But Now I Must Go and gives her a ring braided from their manes "to remember them by". When Harry runs out of the magic ointment he used to grow wings in Black and Blue Magic, he gets one last luminous feather, which he keeps forever in a box. The Changeling begins with a box full of keepsakes, which Martha has kept locked, hidden and forgotten for so long that retrieving them puts her into an altered state.
- Shtum has Georg's "magic crystal" of Bohemia glass, which has been in the family for over a hundred years. His autistic brother Jonatan was very attached to it, and was allowed to bring it with him when he was institutionalized. He was later killed in his sleep by the nurses to spare him from the Nazis. When Georg found the body, the crystal was in his pocket. Georg couldn't bring himself to bury the crystal with him, so he took it to England as the only thing left of his family. Decades later, he passes it on to Jonah, who brings it with him when he is institutionalized.
- All of the Leashed Dogs in Survivor Dogs decide to keep an object that reminds them of their owners. For example, Bruno keeps one of his owner's hats while Sunshine took one of her studded leashes. One by one they learn to abandon their keepsakes as it becomes clear that they'll likely never see their owners again and they must live as Wild Dogs now.
- Sweep: The Story of a Girl and her Monster: Nan's only remaining momento of her old guardian, the Sweep, is her char, a large clump of chimney soot all stuck together. It also manages to be warm in her hand, no matter what. The char eventually comes to life, starting by saving Nan from being cooked alive inside the chimney she was stuck in.
- In This Alien Shore, Kio Masada's wife of ten years was a musician before she died in a pod accident. Masada keeps her keyboard and touches it every day to remind himself of her.
- In Bernard Cromwell's The Warlord Chronicles, a retelling of Arthurian legend, narrator Derfel does this. After his daughter Diane is brutally murdered, he gives her a funeral pyre - but keeps one lock of her golden hair, which he wraps around the hilt of his sword as a promise that he will avenge her. Once he achieves this goal, he burns the hair too, allowing her to finally pass on to the afterlife in their tradition.
- While My Pretty One Sleeps: Renata - who was murdered seventeen years ago - owned a cookbook where she wrote down all her family's recipes, added notes to improve other recipes, and sometimes included doodles and sketches, especially of her young daughter, Neeve. Her daughter still regularly uses the cookbook for the recipes, though she can't bring herself to look at the sketches because the memories they bring up are too painful. Her husband Myles doesn't look at the pages either, but tends to be protective of the book, getting annoyed at Ethel for nosing through it and only just being able to hold it together when Sal accidentally spills coffee on it. Sal himself is deeply apologetic, knowing how much the book means to Myles and Renata. The book, or rather the sketches in it, turn out to be key to solving both Renata's murder and Ethel's.
- In Renegades, Nova always wears an unfinished bracelet that her father was making for her before he was murdered. Just the thought of losing it makes her uneasy.
- Wolf Hall has a few:
- Early on, Cardinal Wolsey relates an amusing rumor that one of his many rings confers immortality and says if he knew which, he'd have a replica made for his favorite, Thomas Cromwell. Just before his exile, he gives Thomas a box with instructions not to open it until Wolsey dies—this happens a few months later in an implied Death by Despair when Henry VIII accuses him of treason. Cromwell finds the box contains Wolsey's turquoise ring. He wears it on his index finger from then on.
- In a grisly example, Cromwell permits Thomas More's daughter to take his head from its spike and later hears the rumors that she carries it around and prays to it.
- Cromwell keeps the costume angel wings that his daughter Grace wore in the hopes that his household might one day have another little girl to wear them, though it seems increasingly unlikely as time goes on. When the closet they're kept in is used as a psychological torture chamber for Mark Smeaton (one of the men accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn), Cromwell decides he will have to burn them.
- In the A World Of Wonder books, Gabriel wears a sandglass pendant, the only inheritance left by his late mother, Sofia. Unfortunately, the sandglass is a symbol for a religious minority, which is just another excuse, besides his Un-Sorcerer status, for Gabriel to be ostracized.
- You Have a Match: Abby's grandfather and photography partner died last year. Since then, she sometimes carries his old camera around to feel closer to him.
