In his personal life, he accumulated acquaintances but tended to avoid intimacy. He had no children.

"This is not the kind of world I want to bring anyone else into," he confided to Learned Hand.

"He told me," [Lewis] Einstein reported, "that after the Civil War the world never seemed quite right again."

In 1932...Holmes tried to read aloud to Marion Frankfurter, Felix Frankfurter's wife, a poem he liked about the Civil War, but he broke down in tears before he could finish it.

Holmes sat on the Supreme Court for thirty years...and he died, in Washington, D.C., in 1935, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday. After his death, two Civil War uniforms were found hanging in his closet with a note pinned to them. It read: 

"These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood."

The Metaphysical Club, Menand, pp 67-68, 69, 437.