The Golden Girls/Tear Jerker

• The Mother's Day episode where Rose encounters an elderly woman going home to visit her daughter. It turns out her daughter is dead and she visits her grave every Mother's Day.
• The episode where the other girls give Rose a dog for her birthday. Hospital volunteer Rose ends up giving the dog to a man whose wife has just died, which doubles as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
• The Whole-Episode Flashback about celebrating birthdays. Rose celebrates her last birthday in St. Olaf, talking to her late husband Charlie as if he's there, telling him goodbye.
• The ending to the episode dealing with the death Sophia's son Phil.
  • "My baby is gone."
• Also the episode "Not Another Monday" - The conversation between Sophia and her friend Martha, who has been contemplating suicide.
• "End of the Curse" - Blanche is going through menopause and spirals into a depression at the thought of getting old. The girls take her to see a therapist, where she reveals that getting old absolutely terrifies her. When she talks about sometimes seeing her mother's face instead of her own in the mirror tugs at the heartstrings:

"You know, sometimes, I look in the mirror, and I see my mother's face. Not all the time, just every now and then, when the lights too bright, or too early in the morning, or late at night, or I look real fast. There it is - my mother's face. Scares me to death [chuckles nervously]. It just scares me to death. I just get so depressed I don't want to get out of bed in the morning...I don't want to get out of bed ever again."

• Thanks to Fridge Depression, the above gets much worse if you've watched the later episode "Mother's Day", where we find out what happened to Blanche's mother - before her death, she was living in a retirement home with Alzheimer's and had trouble remembering who she even was. This is what getting old means to Blanche, and why the thought of seeing her mother's face instead of her own scares and depresses her so much.
• Blanche saying goodbye to Big Daddy: "I'm nobody's little girl anymore..."
  • Another from when Blanche says goodbye to Big Daddy: "I don't know if love can help you wherever you are, but if it can, then, honey, you got it."
  • That episode had a number of Tear Jerker moments around Blanche. The last time she speaks to Big Daddy she's more worried about planning a festival and doesn't believe he sounds that sick. When she gets the news of his death, Blanche thinks he's just faking to get attention from her, until she breaks down crying wondering why she didn't go to him. And then, after returning to her childhood home for the funeral, Blanche gets into an argument with her sister Virginia and refuses to go to Big Daddy's funeral out of spite, missing her last chance to say goodbye to him face-to-face.
    • After getting the call about Big Daddy's death, Blanche cheerfully recalls how Big Daddy used to put ketchup on his lima beans before breaking down and sobbing her eyes out.

Blanche: He always made everything sound...so damn special...oh God, why didn't I go when he called?

• The final scene of the original series, where the girls say goodbye to Dorothy.
• The episode "Old Friends" where Sofia makes friends with Alvin on the boardwalk. The final part is funny, sweet, and tear jerking all at the same time:

Sofia: Hey! Someone's sittin' there!

• • It really becomes a tearjerker when you learn about how Estelle Getty came down with dementia, what Alvin was suffering from in this very episode.
• In one episode, Sofia learns a friend from Shady Pines named Lilian has been transferred to Sunny Pastures, which Sofia explains is the bottom of the barrel for nursing homes. It turns out she's not exaggerating, although we learn this is because it doesn't have enough funding and the guy who runs Sunny Pastures is trying to do the best he can despite the aggravating bureaucratic procedures it takes to the run the place. Sofia conspires to break Lilian out, and does, but we learn that she's genuinely senile and suffering from either dementia or Alzheimer's. Sofia is running herself ragged taking care of Lilian, until the girls manage to find a better nursing home for her. Dorothy comments that everything worked out okay... but wonders why she doesn't feel better. Blanche mentions something along the lines of "because there are places out there that are worse than Sunny Pastures and Lilian just got lucky."
  • Made even worse in hindsight because Blanche is still right. Especially in Florida, which has a very high retiree population, the state of most nursing homes is closer to Sunny Pastures' example than anyone would like. The lawsuit deluge of recent years has arguably made it worse by driving malpractice insurance costs up even further, and most legislation designed to punish negligence is questionably effective at best.
  • That scene: "What happens when there's only one of us left?" Betty White outlived her co-stars by over a decade.
• Miles leaving after it's revealed that the criminal he's been hiding from isn't actually dead. He rushes out after he says goodbye, and leaves Rose his Robert Frost poetry book, telling her to think of him when she reads a certain page. She immediately does:

"And when to the heart of a man, was it ever a less than a treason?/To bow and accept the end of a love, or of a season?"

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