The dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth… and the ambitions they had… and the pleasures they had… and the things they suffered… and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away.

Wilder’s lines imagine death not as a sudden severing but as a slow loosening of attachment. The dead, in this view, do not remain fixed on the living or on unfinished earthly desires; instead they are “weaned” from the world—an image that suggests both tenderness and inevitability. The repetition (“gradually, gradually”) emphasizes time’s soft erosion of ambition, pleasure, suffering, and even love as lived experience. The passage can be read as consoling—grief is met by the idea that the dead are not trapped in longing—yet also unsettling, because it implies that memory and attachment are asymmetrical: the living cling, while the dead move on. It reflects Wilder’s recurring concern with mortality, perspective, and the transience of human striving.