Normal In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

A “normal person” can be considered many different things, depending on the viewpoint of the person. Often times one would consider a “normal person” to be a person without any sort of mental illness. A normal person is someone who adapts to the norms and standards of society.

What is normal? Normal, like the word love, has no true definition and will differ with every person you ask. Defined in the dictionary normal is “to conform to a particular standard” or “desired pattern”. I believe most people will say a normal person is one whom is free from defect, handicap and mental illness. Medicalization is a social process through which a previously normal human condition whether is be behavioral, physiological or emotional, becomes a medical problem in need of treatment. For example, not long ago being a shy person, “being reserved or having or showing nervousness or timidity in the company of other people”, was common and something most people experienced at some points in their lives. However, now shyness

or better yet,” What is the concept of being normal?” The truth is there is no way to be “normal”. As a matter of fact, normality is the state of being “the usual” or expected. It is based upon geographical locations, time, people, etc. With that being said, whatever is normal in your eyes may be strictly abnormal in another’s eyes.

The child who died is considered a gift to the parents and family, and they are forced to give up that gift. Yet, as parents, they also strive to let their child's life, no matter how short, be seen as a gift to others. These parents seek to find ways to continue to love, honor, and value the lives of their children and continue to make the child's presence known and felt in the lives of family and friends. Bereaved parents often try to live their lives more fully and generously because of this painful experience.

When we say normal, we take in to mind what we see on TV and in magazines. TV plays the biggest part in our country's depiction of normal because pretty much every household has a television. If you asked majority of Americans what their idea of a normal family was, they would probably describe something similar to my family; two married parents, a few children, living in a ranch style house, in a middle class neighborhood. Even though this is our idea of normal, it really doesn't seem that way anymore. TV families are changing, and fewer "normal" families can be seen on today's sitcoms. The divorce rate is always getting higher, more and more families are moving into brand new subdivisions, and getting away from the normal seems to be the thing to do these days. I think that the vision of "normal" is slowly changing, mainly because the middle-class families are changing. To me, middle-class and normal go hand in hand.

In simplest terms, normalcy is the state of being normal. Likewise, gender normalcy is what is expected from each gender in our society due to the gender roles that we have learned from the media, our ancestors, and our society as a whole; the media, however, is the main agent of gender normalcy.

When a loved one dies, children handle their grief differently than adults, but they still often grieve very deeply in their own way. Much of the grief children experience comes from the fact that children often lose friends to a sudden death such as a traffic accident. The loss of older loved ones may be more anticipated, such as

It is better explained in a quote from the Addams family, “Normal is an illusion. What is normal to the spider is chaos to the fly”. There are examples throughout my life that show normality as an illusion as well as examples in the world today and in the epic poem Beowulf. Normal is only normal when normal people see it as so. Normal in my life is based on my perspective.

“Children’s responses to grief fluctuate according to their concepts of death, their developmental level, and the way they related to the person now dead.” (Grollman, pg. 49) When the child is going through grief, they usually go through three phases: protest, pain and hope. Some children may not be able to stop crying while others are emotionless. Grieving is different for children and adults.

Long before Alison learns the truth about her father’s sexuality she discovers her own. As Fun Home is an autobiography, the reader is given an unadulterated look into the evolution of Alison’s sexuality. The revelation about her homosexuality occurs with much assistance of literature, a fact Bechdel describes thoroughly: My realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian came about in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing. A revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind.

It is believed that children do not experience grief until one has been through adolescents and can distinguish thoughts and feeling from emotions. According to Glass (1991), a child can grasp the notion of death during early childhood; and can begin to grief as early as six months (Willis, 2002). Willis (2002) believes from a moderate perspective that children begin to understand death and grieve approximately at three to four years old. Many times, small children are affected by loss and their grief is often underestimated. Children between the ages of three to five years old fall into stage one. During stage one; children view death as a going away from one place to another. It is believed that the deceased person has just relocated and is living in a new location. Stage two consists of children between the ages of five to nine years of old. In this phase, death can be fixed. It is thought that if one

Nader and Salloum (2011) made clear that, at different ages, children differ in their understanding of the universality, inevitability, unpredictability, irreversibility, and causality of death. They believed, despite the increasing understanding with age of the physical aspects of death, a child may simultaneously hold more than one idea about the characteristics of death. However, factors that complete the determining nature of childhood grieving across different age groups may be a difficult task for a number of reasons including their environment in means of the support they have available, the child’s nature in terms of their personality, genetics, and gender, coping skills and previous experiences, the developmental age, grieving style, whether or not therapy was received, and the relationship to the deceased (Nader & Salloum, 2011). Crenshaw (2005) found that according to our current understanding of childhood traumatic grief and normal grief, thoughts and images of a traumatic nature are so terrifying, horrific, and anxiety provoking that they cause the child to avoid and shut out these thoughts and images that would be comforting reminders of the person who died. The distressing and intrusive images, reminders, and thoughts of the traumatic circumstances of the death, along with the physiological hyper-arousal associated with such re-experiencing, prevent the child from proceeding in a healthy way with the grieving process (Crenshaw, 2005). McClatchy, Vonk, and

The loss of an adult child is devastating just as is the death of a younger child. However, there are differences as to how both the parents react to such losses. In this case the paper focuses on loss of an adult child and how the parent copes with the situation. The paper will give insight on the situation that precedes the demise of the child such as trajectory of illnesses which is more recent. A review on how the parents deal with the loss after it occurs will be discussed as well as the various issues the parent faces. The impact on the parent after the child’s loss is also featured. There will be a summary of the findings then finally a section that will give the implications of the research and its importance to the field of psychology and an improvement in human beings

This essay explores several models and theories that discuss the complexities of loss and grief. A discussion of the tasks, reactions and understanding of grief through the different stages from infants to the elderly, will also be attempted.

In all aspects of the lives we live, normal can not ever be defined as a single idea. If normal is such a thing at all, it is a subjective opinion and can only be defined on an individual level. Everything we interpret is relative to our upbringing and our environment. Not one person had the same upbringing or lived in the same environment as another person for even siblings who have lived together their whole lives have different nurturing experiences. The differentiation between normal and abnormal is a topic of much debate. The meaning of normality varies in many ways such as by person, time, place, situation, culture and set of values. Normality is usually seen as good and desirable by society and what society thinks while abnormality may be seen as bad or undesirable (Boundless).