Making Peace with the Past
Death is a natural process that creeps into everyone’s lives at one point. Ready or not, the process of losing a loved one is an oppressive sense of despair. Grief is a natural response to the loss of a loved one. It is numbing and can take a vast toll on a person. How someone “formulates or represents the past shapes their understanding and views of the present” (House). The process of grief in Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter is displayed by characterization, figurative language, symbolism, and flashback.
For instance, everyone copes with grief differently and at their own pace. Many react to death by becoming depressed, angry, engaging in reckless compulsive behavior, or living in denial. These natural reactions
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Laurel remembered the breadboard as a clean, beautiful carved board that was very well kept. She was livid when she found Fay cracking nuts on it with a hammer. The beautiful board was now dull, full of splinters, and used to extinguish cigarettes. Enraged, Laurel was tempted to strike Fay on the head with the board but then “realized that the breadboard was a visible sign of the past and does not contain the memory” (Phillips). She was so focused on the physical object rather than the memory behind the breadboard. Laurel realizes that a memory is not “lived in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again” (Welty 179).
By the same token, the West Virginia Mountains are a symbol of strength. As a child, Laurel’s mother, Becky, lived in Virginia with her family. Laurel’s mother never felt more alive than when she was on those mountains. She obtained a sense of resilience up there. After marrying Clinton, they settled in Mount Salus, Mississippi. The mountains helped her endure her illness with great fortitude, hence why she wanted to return to West Virginia when she was on her death bed. The thought and imagination of the mountains encouraged her to keep
Most people in the world have had a hard time admitting that someone has died that they care about. In the world this happens a lot because it is a hard thing to excepted. Lucille Fletcher, the author of “The Hitchhiker” shows the fear of death through the eyes of the main character that can not escape that he is dead. He is being followed by a Hitchhiker that is representing death because the main character is dead which goes back to not admitting that someone is dead. In the story “The Hitchhiker,” Lucille Fletcher uses flashback, foreshadowing,and symbolism to build a mood.
The life transition of death and dying is inevitably one with which we will all be faced; we will all experience the death of people we hold close throughout our lifetime. This paper will explore the different processes of grief including the bereavement, mourning, and sorrow individuals go through after losing someone to death. Bereavement is a period of adaptation following a life changing loss. This period encompasses mourning, which includes behaviors and rituals following a death, and the wide range of emotions that go with it. Sorrow is the state of ongoing sadness not overcome in the grieving process; though not pathological, persistent
5. Although each person reacts to the knowledge of impending death or to loss in his or her own way, there are similarities in the psychosocial responses to the situation.
The poem Mother Who Gave Me Life by Gwen Harwood, is about the speaker’s mother and her life that is near death. This focused universal thematic concern of motherhood is conveyed through a reflective tone, as the speaker is seen to acutely contemplate her mother’s life and the wisdom she has been taught. Gwen Harwood uses a eulogy structure to undertow the reader’s focus to the praise the speaker has for her mother. As well as creatively embedding the use of enjambment, repetition and metaphors, Harwood attempts to convey the emotion of the speaker reconciling her final moments with her mother.
None react alike but they contrast their own personality when grieving where some for example deals with it through actions and others by ignorance. They all have one thing in common, death is unescapeable and coping with it is difficult. You get trapped in some sort of darkness full of emotions where you don’t know how to feel or even how to react. Death is something everyone is going to encounter despite wealth or health and by grieving you move forward in life ready to confront new challenges without your loved one by your side. Alice Sebold made this clear through displaying how people change and that it isn’t always something negative, but that it also could lead to better things in life. This could be developing as a human being and becoming less fragile to these types of
In the poem the speaker’s daughter is being mocked by some white children for being Japanese. The speaker then has a flashback to her time living in Slocan. She remembers the time when the other white kids made fun of her and she ran into the forest to hide and at the same time talks about the woodticks that can dig into your scalp. When she reaches deep into the forest, she then listens for the voices of the kids to guide her back onto the path, and she vows to never go near the mountain alone again. Then she flashes forwards back to the present and she reassures her daughter that they do not have woodticks in Saskatoon.
“That Ray was not unhappy, he knew nothing of what was to come and so he did not suffer…he was happy in his lifetime, he loved his work, his domestic life, loved to garden…he did not suffer the loss of meaning that his survivor feels. Ray’s death was no tragedy but a completion” (Oates 241). This revelation was very powerful to me, as much as she is suffering depressed and having suicidal thoughts; she is able to start having moments of clarity. I saw this as a positive step in her healing. As she states “the widow must remember, her husband death did not happen to her but to her husband. I must stop dwelling upon the past, which can’t be altered” (Oates 228). She reminds herself that “you have your writing, your friends and your students” (Oates 264) and this gives me a sense of hope for her. I am eager to proceed with reading the last section of this book and knowing the outcome of this memoir; that I have enjoyed
In her essay “Nine Days of Ruth,” Angela Morales eloquently yet humorously narrates the final nine days of her grandmother’s life. Initially, Morales reminisces about the day her grandmother Ruth passed away projecting a gothic, murky and vacant atmosphere. However, Morales shifts from a leaden tone to a more gratifying voice revealing her grandmother’s life trajectory: betrayal, death, and struggles. The author ends with a eulogy expressing to her grandmother that while other will bury with a different image or perspective in mind, she will bury her as a luminary. Make-believe, fantasy, and imagination play an important role in the essay because it conveys the beauty of death.
Gwen Harwood’s mournful laments Mother Who Gave Me Life and Father and Child explore the challenging ideas of nostalgia and mortality to provide valued texts.
Often, people can be similar through their basic details such as gender or general location, yet they can be vastly different in all other aspects of life, including their personalities. Eudora Welty depicts this in her novel by showing two completely different people put in the same position. Fay and Becky are both married to a high ranking official, move to a new town where they hardly know anyone, and have to overcome death and disease. The novel The Optimist’s Daughter portrays two contrasting characters, Fay and Becky McKelva, through the honor of society, the love of a husband, and the idea of selfishness.
Death and dying is an inescapable process that all humans will face at some time in life, whether it is the death of a friend or family member. After experiencing the death of a loved one comes the process of grieving, which is part of coping with the loss of a loved one. The Optimist’s Daughter is a novel written by Eudora Welty, and it is based on a girl named Laurel McKelva Hand and her struggles with grief. Laurel utilizes memory to overcome the grief she experiences, resulting from the loss of her family.
As the story begins, the reader can already perceive that Laurel hasn’t kept herself in close relations with her family. She travels south from her home in Chicago to visit
The stages of mourning and grief are universal and are experienced by people from all walks of life. Mourning occurs in response to an individual’s own terminal illness or to the death of a valued being, human or animal. There are five stages of normal grief that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying.”
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
The sorrowful and unpredictable realization of denial and loss can slowly tear down even the strongest willed individuals. In the twisting tales of “A Rose for Emily” and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” the recurring theme of denial continuously reminds the reader that life is precious and to never take anything for granted. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” focuses on the life and death of Emily Grierson. Although the story begins with her death, the details of her life are revealed through several elements. Emily is ultimately “jilted” by the man she falls in love with, Homer Barron, and poisons him to ensure a lifelong commitment. A similar theme appears within Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” Ellen Weatherall, is on her deathbed as the story begins. The narrator discusses Granny’s life and the struggles she faced in the past. As Granny lays upon her deathbed, she recalls all the things she has to do and all the chores she has left undone. She also remarks the element of surprise at the fact that death has come upon her. Not only do these two stories repeatedly use elements such as symbolism and foreshadowing the authors create a relatively similar theme that not only delivers a powerful message but is a timeless classic.