Virginia Woolf first mentions Mrs. Ramsay's death in brackets, in the most famous sentence of To the Lighthouse: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” In her memoir, it is Woolf herself who stretches her arms out on the night her mother dies: “My father staggered out of the bedroom as we came. I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch; distraught.” The passage recalls Odysseus's encounter with the shade of his mother in Book 11 of The Odyssey. Woolf singled out the passage in Homer when she first read it at the age of fifteen, two years after her mother's death. In Fitzgerald's translation: “I bit my lip,/rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,/and tried three times, putting my arms around her,/but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable/as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.” The corresponding scene in The Aeneid, Aeneas's meeting with the ghost of his father, includes the word “arms” (bracchia) in the original Latin: “At this his tears brimmed over/And down his cheeks. And there he tried three times/ To throw his arms around his father's neck,/Three times the shade untouched slipped through his hands,/Weightless as wind and fugitive as dream.