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Examples Of Grief In The Piano Lesson

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Loosing someone you love can cause very profound feelings leading towards a grief process. One of the stages of grief is denial, which can cause someone to not enjoy life and experience many wonderful things like love. Anger is another example, it makes a person be angry for a very long time and make it hard to move on. The final example of the grief is acceptance and can produce a lack of social interaction. In the Piano lesson Berniece shows the stages of grief by staying angry at Boy Willie, denying Avery's marriage proposal, and by not wanting to have contact with the piano. Towards the beginning of the play they tell us that Crawley was shot while stealing wood accompanied by Boy Willie. Berniece blames him she says, " You killed Crawley just as sure as if you pulled the trigger"(page 52).What makes her angry is that Boy willie was there and he could've possibly prevented her husbands death. They both don’t have a good relationship with each other especially when he tries to sell their piano. The loss of Crawley is ceasing her from enjoying life and its making it hard to move on. In the play she says " Avery, I ain't ready to get married now"(page 66). Avery wants to marry Berniece soon, but even after three years of her husbands death, she still doesn’t want to have a romantic …show more content…

The history of what the piano and her family makes it hard for her to have any contact with the piano. Berniece also mentions that she does not want to play it because she might wake the spirits of her ancestors that had passed. We can conclude that, that is the reason she says " Avery.. I done told you I don’t want to play that piano, now or no other time"(page 71). But that changed till one day the family experienced the presence of Sutter, and in order to remove it Berniece was brave enough to play the piano and call out her ancestors to help them remove the

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