Dealing With Grief In The Lovely Bones Essay

Kubler-Ross, E and Kessler, D (2005). On Grief and Grieving, London: Simon & Schuster. p7-28.

However, the characters in Ordinary People do not conform to the stereotypical gender grief scripts and instead reflect the different grieving styles captured in Martin and Doka’s (2011) grieving styles continuum. Martin and Doka (2011) conceptualizes grieving styles ranging on a continuum from intuitive to instrumental. Grieving styles reflect individuals’ ability to adapt to loss and are distinguished by their use of cognitive and affective domains to process grief.

The death of a loved one can result in a trauma where the painful experience causes a psychological scar. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones explores the different ways in which people process grief when they lose a loved one. When young Susie Salmon is killed on her way home from school, the remaining four members of her family all deal differently with their grief. After Susie’s death, her mother, Abigail Salmon, endures the adversity of losing her daughter, her family collapsing, and accepting the loss of the life she never had the opportunity to live. Abigail uses Freud’s defence mechanisms to repress wounds, fears, her guilty desires, and to resolve conflicts, which results in her alienation and

Loss of a loved one and the stages of mourning or grief manifest as overriding themes in The Lovely Bones. Through the voice of Susie Salmon, the fourteen-year-old narrator of the novel, readers get an in-depth look at the grieving process. Susie focuses more on the aftermath and effects of her murder and rape on her family rather than on the event itself. She watches her parents and sister move through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, Alice Sebold makes clear that these categories do not necessarily remain rigid and that individuals deal with grief in various ways. For example, Abigail, Susie's mother, withdraws from her living children,

“Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.” -Alice Sebold. Alice Sebold the author of Lovely Bones creates a story of depression, guilt, and grief with the murder of Susie Salmons. In Lovely Bones the death of Susie affects all those close to her, like her mother, her father and her classmates. Her father grieves with despair as the murderer has yet to be caught. Her mother can not handle her disappearance and finds unnerving ways to cope. Susie’s classmates, Ruth and Ray both find ways to cope with each other and through other connections with Susie. A death of a loved young one is one no one is ever ready for. The grief starts and people find ways to feel guilty. If no mental aid is present the associates will

Many people define their lives by the relationships within their family. They are someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, or someone’s mother or father. The loss of a family member, especially due to death, creates a radical readjustment to people’s day to day lives and how they see and feel about themselves. Sometimes the process of grief can last over several years and how it is mentally processed and dealt with is different for everyone. “Mud” by Geoffrey Forsyth, shows an insightful view of a grieving man who had already lost his father and grandmother and is now just coming to terms with the loss of his wife two years prior. The entire story is written in first person point of view which allows for the reader to fully engage themselves in the grief and strife of the narrator’s life. Geoffrey’s story “Mud” begins in the home of the narrator where he encounters these dead family members and has to decide if he is ready to move on from his grief and say goodbye or stay behind and be consumed by it.

Loss is a phenomenon that is experienced by all. Death is experienced by family members as a unique and elevated form of loss which is modulated by potent stages of grief. Inevitably, everyone will lose someone with whom they had a personal relationship and emotional connection and thus experience an aftermath that can generally be described as grief. Although bereavement, which is defined as a state of sorrow over the death or departure of a loved one, is a universal experience it varies widely across gender, age, and circumstance (definitions.net, 2015). Indeed the formalities and phases associated with bereavement have been recounted and theorized in literature for years. These philosophies are quite diverse but

When someone goes through a time of grief, it is only natural to find a way to deal with the hardships and until it eventually goes away, but people may come to realize that the loss can never be forgotten. This process of grieving and fighting through hard times to finally come to peace and accept reality is also reflected in literature such as “Hold Tight”. The short story ¨Hold Tight¨ by Amy Bloom shows that when people deal with grief, people may try to find ways to cope with the pain by letting out their anger on others or becoming self-destructive, even though it may not be possible to completely forget the woe.

The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.

"Emotions are like waves. You cannot stop them from coming but you can decide which ones to surf". As described in this quote, we cannot delete our emotions but if we learn to surf the waves of our emotions and manage our thoughts and feel our feelings, we will be able to deal better with the difficult situations in life. Grief is the conflicting and strong emotion caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behaviour. Each individual deals with grief in very different ways. In Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" and William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", the main theme and emotion portrayed throughout the two works is grief with the intent of revenge. In Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones", the Salmon family find it difficult to grieve

Despite Buckley’s young age when Susie first disappeared, his life is greatly affected by the loss. He is extremely angry and resentful towards his parents. Buckley feels that his relationship with his father is shadowed by his inability to move past the loss of Susie. The tension between them peaks when Jack tells Buckley he cannot use Susie’s old clothes in his garden, but it is not simply about the garden. The garden is symbolic of new life and growth in the future and Susie’s shirts symbolize her existence. Although Susie’s clothes would no longer be intact, they would become part of the garden, just as Susie will always be part of the family even though she is no longer with them. This scene is also important for Jack and Buckley’s relationship because Buckley finally tells his father how isolated he feels. Abigail and Buckley’s relationship, on the other hand, is not so easily patched. Buckley is bitter that his mother missed so many important events in his life. The

This causes Jack to be driven off the edge in hatred, which also causes his family to be in danger of abuse yet again.

A comparison of the ways that the dead affect the living in the novels Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

In her seminal work on grief and grieving, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the concept now very well known as the Five (5) Stages of Grief, enumerated chronologically as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In this concept, Kubler-Ross explored and discussed the normative stages that people go through when they experience the loss of a loved one and feel grief as result of this loss. It is also through these stages that people are now more aware of their feelings and thoughts when experiencing grief and the loss of a loved one. While the stages of loss are mainly developed for grief experienced with the death of a loved one, it is a generally accepted framework in understanding feelings of grief when an individual experiences the loss of a significant individual in his/her life. The discussions that follow center on the discussion of Kubler-Ross' 5 Stages of Grief, applied in the context of the Story of Job in the Bible.

The process of dealing with grief after a loved one has passed away is proven to be complicated and chaotic. Loss creates a shattering of the regular routine and dissolves any meaning of regular life that was once held. Psychologists have released a commonality chart in order to aid people in grieving; providing a linear process to work through. People utilize these guidelines in hopes that the pain caused by the loss of the departed will end quickly. This convention of mourning typically includes five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Mourners tend to look for a way to articulate and release their grief: some do this through extreme measures, and others look towards art, music, or writing for a release. John Clayton argues that this act of expression is a gesture of healing- although it may not fall under the stereotypical five stage: “any expressive art is as an attempt to end discords in its creator- to express that experiences and so gain control of it” (Clayton, 4). Donald Hall, in his book Without, articulates his grief over his late wife through writing poems. Within these poems, Hall engages with the process of mourning. Although he does not participate in all five of the conventional stages of grief, it is evident that Hall engages with denial and isolation, depression, and anger. Without expresses how Hall choses to confront the grief and the