The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

Pain is one thing everyone shares. Everyone in the world is affected by pain at one point in their life. Pain affects everyone differently, some people take it to heart and punish themselves, while others blame others for their pain and punish them. In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd uses death and memories to convey the idea that people deal with pain and grief in different ways. Lily sees pain as a reflection on herself and uses it as an excuse to lock herself away from the rest of the world and suffer in silence. Lily’s mother is the cause of much of her grief, through her journey she imagines her mother in a way that does not accurately depict who her mother truly was. When she finds out what her mother actually was she, “I stood

May has a wall that allows her understand they feelings she is feeling. August explains this by saying, “‘All those bits of paper you see out there stuck between the stones are things May has written down—all the heavy feelings she carries around’” (104). Any sad story May is told she is affected greatly, although many of them have no relevance to her. As a child she went though a great lose and because of that she is affected by others suffering. The stories she hears reminds her of the time she lost her sister and she falls back into the way she felt them. Through the story she handles this burden very well, with the help of August, until Zach goes to jail. No one wanted to tell May Zach went to jail because of her reaction; “May lay in two feet of water with a huge river stone on top of her chest. It weighted her body, holding it on the bottom” (192). May’s reaction to Zach going to prison seems more severe because he is someone she knows. The severity of May’s reaction escalated so much because she has started to relive her sister dying. Zach is someone she cares for deeply and when he is taken away, May sees no interested in living in a world were she has to face that type of pain again. May’s pain is derived from her relationship with her sister, April. She relives the pain she felt when April died everytime someone else goes through that same