Annotation In The Life Of The Dead

“The Life of the Dead” challenges conventional beliefs of reality and explores the ways in which imagination and memory can help us cope with loss and find comfort in the loss of life. Through the use of vivid imagery and personal antidotes, there is a way that one can cope with a person’s death through storytelling. At the beginning of the story, we learn about the love and loss shared between Tim and Linda. When Tim was only nine years old, he was infatuated with a girl in his class. He was positive that it was true love and told the story in a way a reader could understand. When Linda passes away, this is his first time coping with death through storytelling that follows him through adulthood. When Tim came across a little village along

Tim had not found any humor in the old man’s death like the rest of them. Instead, he used his own coping mechanisms that he carried throughout his childhood by keeping the dead alive through storytelling. He introduces Linda, and where his coping mechanism comes from. Tim goes back in time to start from the beginning, Linda. He creates an image of his love before and after she gets sick and dies. When it is introduced, that Linda is terminally sick, Tim say’s that he loved her too much to believe that she was actually going to die from the brain tumor. It was like she was never sick until Nick Veenhof came up to Tim and said “Your girlfriend, she kicked the bucket”. She’s dead, my mom told me at lunch time. No lie, she actually kicked the goddang bucket” Even after Linda died and he went to the viewing to physically see that she had died, he still could not accept that she was dead. He believed that he loved Linda so much, that there wasn’t a way to formally accept her death. Tim went home and started to daydream Linda back to life, and this is where the beginning of his coping mechanism begins. As Tim comes across many dead bodies throughout his time in war, he carries that same coping mechanism as he did with