Friends and family relationships and social bonds

Friends and Family

Dealing with the Grief Caused by Losing a Loved One

My mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish," (Faulkner 196), there are many strange tales of grief ridden characters internalizing their misery in strange ways. Reviewing the work of William Faulkner's as I Lay Dying, Emily Dickinson's 184th poem, and William Shakespeare's classic a Winter's Tale, one can see examples of the strange behavior of characters dealing with the loss of a loved one. Faulkner explores the question of existing in the aftermath a mother's death; Dickson becomes obsessed with the vision of her own death as a response to a trauma in her real life, and Shakespeare portrays a king devastated by his own decision to kill his queen.

The Brunden family, of Faulkner's as I Lay Dying, is in the midst of dealing with their mother's death. All the characters have their individual ways of dealing with this death. Addie, the mother, is a constant presence in the family even after her death. She even has her own monologue express regrets about motherhood, "I knew it had been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came," (Faulkner 172). Because her family continues to obsess over her death, she is not allowed to fully die. Her youngest son, Vardaman, is the one with the hardest time understanding that she does no longer exist in his world. He still believes that she is alive, just in a different form. He even drills holes in her coffin to provide her an escape route, "She got out through the holes I bored, into the water I said, and when we come to the water again I am going to see her," (196). The characters in the novel cannot fully let go of Addie Brunden, therefore never fully get over the grief of her loss, all except Anse who had already married another right after her death.

The poetry of Emily Dickenson also internalizes the grief in a very strange yet interesting way. Dickson had to deal with a few close relationships end in death, including that of her father, (Crumbley, 2000). Due to her nature of solitude, a death hit Dickenson hard. In her writing she tends to obsess over the act of dying. Much of her poetry features a first person narrator speaking about the actual experience of dying, "I hear a Fly buzz - when I died," (Dickson, 111). The grief she feels from the death of a loved one in a very personal way, so much so that she envisions experiencing her own death over and over again in several of her poems. She internalizes the grief of death into an obsession with the act of dying, "And then the Windows failed - and then / I could not see to see," (112).