How Does Jonathan Safran Foer Deal With Grief

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 thundering sound of the bomb blast could be heard for miles. Men, women, and children run frantically in order to find shelter, being blinding by the massive amounts of dust that have caused the sky to turn yellow. Mothers are scavenging for their children, who were playing games outside, now stuck deep in the rubble of buildings that have collapsed on top of them. Houses have been destroyed, families have been obliterated and innocent lives have been lost. For many around the world, situations like these have become a part of everyday life. In A Pure, High Note of Anguish, author Barbara Kingsolver describes the confusion and questions that arose after the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11th. 9/11 was the largest terrorist

Her clearest moments of encouragement are when she’s talking one-on-one with Oskar, and therefore almost directly to the reader. First, she tells him “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness” (Foer, 180). If a person was reading this book to find advice for how to live life after a traumatic experience, this would be a home run. Contrary to a lot of books, she’s not telling Oskar to just forget about what happened. She’s not ordering him to move on with his life and expecting him to be completely unaffected by the tragedy, because she knows that isn’t possible and she knows what happens if someone doesn’t face his issues. The grandmother also knows what would happen if Oskar were to completely shut himself off from happiness and avoid anything that made him sad, because that is what his grandfather did. So instead, she advices

It’s easier to turn a blind eye to other people's problems instead of getting involved from fear of causing pain to ourselves. “My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent” (39). Sometimes there’s a risk of us getting hurt, so we just pretend something didn't happen. I think it’s easier that way. It’s easier to just look away and not get our heart involved rather than risk being hurt ourselves, like when someone we didn’t know, or who wasn’t close to us dies, it doesn't bother us a lot. Their death doesn’t directly affect us or our daily lives. In fact, we try not to think about it because it would put a burden on us. The Jews couldn't think of every single person who died, otherwise they wouldn't be able to function normally. The grief would wash over them like an unbearable wave. “The dead remained in the yard, under the snow without even a marker, like fallen guards. No one recited Kaddish over them. Sons abandoned the remains of their fathers without a tear” (92). The sons couldn't care about their fathers deaths. They had to move on in order to survive. The Jewish prisoners saw so much death that eventually it didn't seem to bother them. It didn’t matter who died, because they couldn’t care. All they could care about was survival. All of these deaths that they saw everyday were only a part of the traumatic event they went

Everyone grieves differently and just because someone doesn’t grieve the way you would doesn't mean they do not care. Some people can accept things faster than others.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is, on the surface, about the ways in which a family copes with grief, and the ways in which a young boy, Oskar Schell, copes with the loss of his father in the aftermath of 9/11. However, at the root of the novel, the author is expressing a sentiment about the very human difficulty of expressing deep, internalized emotions. In the wake of great emotional pain, people are prone to retreat within themselves, internalize their emotions, and lose their ability to express and share their feelings with those around them. In short, they miscommunicate. Both Oskar Schell and Thomas Schell (two of the book’s main narrators) have experienced tremendous pain and loss, and they both follow this pattern of being hurt

“A tear rolled down her cheek and Ruthanne hugged her. ‘Now thank you, honey,’ said Ruthanne. ‘Lord knows it surely does help to share grief with somebody else’”(Crowe 125). Ruthanne and Hiram become closer because of the connection that they had with

Grief is really a tricky thing. Many people take years to grieve, others take a few days. The grieving process allows people that have lost ones they love come to terms with what has happened. There is no one way to do grieve that works for every person. For Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, his strategy for grieving is storytelling.

When a loved when is gone it feels like a hole in the world. With much grief he says, “Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did. Questions I have can never now get answers. The world is emptier. My son is gone. Only a hole remains, Avoid, a gap, never to be filled”(33). This phrase describes his emotions and how he views the world without his son. The author gives advice on what to say to someone who is mourning. He says to never say its Ok because its never okay and death is awful. “ What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation” (34). When some passes away no one really knows what his or her loved ones are feeling because each death is unique and each person is different. The wisest of words don’t even make the pain go away, and all that can be done is lending an ear to listen, a shoulder to lean on.

Unfortunately, grief is something everyone has to deal with numerous times in their lifetime. It is a feeling that is especially uncomfortable and depressing, and is difficult to properly manage. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, several characters struggle with unjust grief in the loss of loved ones in a variety of ways. This demonstrates how people all handle emotions differently, and can internalize, externalize, or feign their feelings when coping.

Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of

To accept grief as part of our lives, we must first acknowledge the presence of grief. Grief is felt when there is a loss of something, or someone that is close to us. People feel, and deal with grief in different ways, including denial, and the lack of acknowledgement that something or someone has been lost. “I should not treat you like a homeless dog who comes to the back door for a crust, a meatless bone. I should trust you.” This first stanza of the poem tells us

“He needed me, and I couldn’t pick up” (Foer 381). Oskar never said that to nobody but maybe he just could not hold in anymore so he had to tell somebody, it was his grandfather that he told this to. That right there is guilt and guilt is another reason Oskar might be feeling like he is. Oskar feels like if he had picked up the phone call from his before he died, he would still be alive and with him. There are five different types of guilt and Oskar experience compassion fatigue which is the guilt that he did enough to save some which in this case is his father (Susan Krauss Whitbourne).

The first way grief is shown is by Hamlet when his father, King Hamlet, dies. The passing of the king had hurt everyone in his city but they were able to move on. Hamlet was the only one that was not able to return to everyday life. He was still grieving and this changed the way he lived life. Hamlet is talking to his mother about how he needs to return to normal life but he refuses. Hamlet says, “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’. ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black… But I have that within which passes show—these but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Shakespeare 1716). Hamlet is only showing a little bit of the grief he feels but will not let go of it. His mother is telling him to get rid of his mourning clothes but he refuses because he still feels too much grief for his father. In “Accommodating Death: The Ending of Hamlet” by Richard Fly, he says, “Hamlet’s impious stubbornness seems willful and arbitrary to the conventional wisdom of the court, merely the response of an understanding simple and unschooled in social realities. But it if his

The passing of a loved one is a universal experience and every person will experience loss or heartache, at some point in their life. Some people obviously appear upset, some do not, grief is individual, dependent on; age, gender, development stage, personality, their normal stress reactions, the support available, their relationships or attachments, other death experiences, how others react to their own grief around them (Thompson & Hendry, 2012).