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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to a psychologist in Chapter 13, husbands and wives are each other's what?
(a) Greatest lovers.
(b) Best friends.
(c) Intimate enemies.
(d) Coping mechanism.

2. Which famous author wrote this about the loss of his cherished wife: "The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again"?
(a) C.S. Lewis.
(b) Victor Hugo.
(c) Charles Dickens.
(d) J.R.R. Tolkien.

3. Viorst references The World According to Garp and a mishearing of this term by a child.
(a) Tsunami.
(b) Earthquake.
(c) Undertow.
(d) Thunder.

4. Parents have trouble seeing their children as what?
(a) A part of themselves.
(b) Separate people.
(c) Competent humans.
(d) Anything but perfect.

5. According to Chapter 13, there can be no human love without what?
(a) Ambivalence.
(b) A caring parental relationship.
(c) Fear.
(d) Passion and romance.

Short Answer Questions

1. As our parents grow old, get sick, and die, we learn to do what in relation to imperfect connections?

2. How many stages are there in the journey towards death according to Kubler-Ross?

3. What does this line from a poem by Longfellow tell us about old age? "Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past."

4. Which of the following psychoanalysts said we create religion to "exorcise the terrors" of nature?

5. In Chapter 14, Viorst lists what about her hometown?

Short Essay Questions

1. Viorst suggests two necessary losses in Chapter 14. Name one of them.

2. In thinking about losses as a lifelong theme, name some of the juxtapositions that Viorst discusses in Chapter 20.

3. Which necessary loss is discussed in Chapter 12?

4. What can happen as a result of a mother's fear that her child's psyche is fragile? How can this affect the child?

5. Viorst describes a sort of "opposites attract" type marriage relationship where each party meets a neurotic need of the other party. What did she call this type of arrangement?

6. Name two of the stages of mourning that Viorst describes in Chapter 16.

7. What are a few of the difficulties of a marriage relationship mentioned in Chapter 13?

8. How does baggage from childhood put pressure on a marriage?

9. Other than a parent, what other things impact who a child becomes?

10. How did Viorst's three friends approach death differently?

(see the answer keys)

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