The Difficulty of Processing Grief

The internal conflict Jackself experiences following Jeremy Wren’s death functions as a means to express the difficulties of processing grief after a traumatic experience.

Immediately following Jeremy Wren’s suicide, Jackself’s grief takes on the form of denial as he can barely comprehend what has happened to his best friend. This is shown in the poem “The Hole,” which describes Wren’s funeral. In the first stanza of this poem it is said, “it’s hard for Jackself to hold/in his head the box that holds Jeremy Wren” (42). Clearly Jackself has great difficulty accepting that his friend is gone, as evidenced by his inability to even comprehend the fact that Wren’s body lies in the coffin that is soon to be buried in the ground. This denial is then picked up by the adults later on in the...