The first scene of “The Years”, a novel written by Virginia Woolf and published in 1936, relates to a woman who is about to die. After her death, other people die in a sequence, but there seems to be no disappointment, and the characters talk about death rather naturally and future losses are seen as bearable. This analysis understands that this representation of the death announcement in the fictional society of “The Years” is rather different when compared to other loss representations in Woolf’s works, as well to some other modernist novels. As a counterpoint, we present two scenes: one in Proust’s novel “Du côte de chez Swann”, 1913, about Marcel mother’s ‘There is no answer’, which is refused by the little boy; the other in “Albertine disparue”, 1925, a scene repeated when Marcel gets Albertine’s death note, denying it once more. The note scene repeats in “The Years”. The Rose funeral invitation is sent and some other ‘no answer’ notes are seen, although they reverberate differently in Virginia Woolf and Proust literatures. Whereas in “The Years”, there is no metaphor related to death, in Proust, the lack of the mother’s answer is represented by different, displaced and distorted metaphors and metonymies. Taking this into account, how does one evaluate Woolf’s narrative, which is built from the no-mediation, nometaphor against the loss in “The Years” ?