The death of Miss Emily Grierson, is from "Dementia", and everybody in the community has to come visit her at death, "the men, through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one, save and old manservant - a combined gardener and cook - had seen in at least ten years" (622). In "A Rose for Emily", William Faulkner traces Miss Emily's increasing dementia and foreshadows the surprise ending.
Unquestionably, there are the townspeople that have always perceived the Grierson family. "We had long thought of them as tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white, as contrasted with her father who described as a straddled silhouette" (624). When her father dies and leaves her penniless, people are glad they can pity her. The unemotional Miss Emily clings to her father for three days. She broke down, and they buried her father quickly (624). The townspeople did say she is crazy then; they believe she is in denial. For a long period after her father's death, Miss Emily is sick and remains in solitude. During the summer after her father's death, she is now seen by the townspeople with a Yankee day laborer driving the yellow-buggy every Sunday afternoons. The older townspeople think that even with Miss Emily's grief, she cannot forget that she has come from a family of a higher social position than to date a northern Yankee. Still, the townspeople say "Poor Emily," (625). Declaring her "fallen" from the high Grierson perch. .
After, Miss Emily appears to come out of solitudes. She is described as "a slight woman, thought thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye-sockets as imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look" (625). Then, she goes to the town druggist to buy poison, "the best" - "arsenic" (625). With the druggist thinking she is going to end her miserable life, he gives her the poison.
