Grief

The author instigates her thematic explorations concerning grief via her first person narrator’s response to her mother’s death. Ten months following her mother’s passing, the narrator takes a trip to London by herself. Although the trip follows shortly after her mother’s death, the narrator refuses to identify the trip’s inspiration as the loss of her mother. Rather, she says, “I was trying to decide what I thought about my life” (2). This is the first instance of the narrator’s avoidant personality, particularly in the context of her own emotionality. She later says that although “Condoling friends used the words grief and mourning,” neither of these words captured “what I felt. All my life I’d heard people use those words to discuss the ordinary deaths of elderly people—or, worse, elderly animals” (5). She therefore deems these descriptions of her emotions as...