Character
Anticlea
Odysseus's mother · dead of grief for him
Odysseus's mother, whom he finds among the dead — the first shock of the underworld, because he did not know she had died. She tells him she was killed by nothing but longing for him, and when he tries three times to take her in his arms she slips through them like a shadow, which is how the poem explains what a ghost is. Her death is the plainest measure of what the hero's ten missing years cost the people who waited.
Her answer to how she died — nothing but longing for him — is the poem's plainest measure of what his ten missing years cost the people who waited.