Grief And Loss In Angela Leighton's Glass

Grief and Loss in Glass by Angela Leighton

Motherhood and grief are strong themes in Angela Leighton's short story Glass. The story revolves around mother's memories of her last day spent with her daughter, Anna , who she adored and admired greatly. The mother who, interestingly enough, remains unnamed, blames herself for not being able to predict the unpredictble – her daughter's unfortunate suicide. Therefore it is hard not to notice the imagery of guilt that follows mother every step of the way as she walks the narrow streets of Venice. At this point we must ask ourselves, what caused the strong self-reproach?
Indeed, it is safe to assume that contemporary society has a great influence on women and their whole motherhood experience. Accordingly, in this essay I want us to

They looked like the enormous tears of a Pietà. They were not, on the whole, what her mother would have chosen. 10
Michelangelo's sculptural masterpiece, Pietà, depicts the body of Jesus Christ on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion. With this amazing and subtle foreshadowing used by the author, we can see the true mother's suffering and how Mary's grief is transformed into her grief. The passage quoted is the very end of the part of the story where the mother is remembering the events from two years ago and it marks the end of the flashback. The mother is brought back to reality as her thoughts are shattered by the sound of a siren:
She clutched the stony parapet with both hands, trying to hold on to something that must stop, yet still rang on, like hope, against hope, against hope – something that she could not hold, however hard she held the stone under her palms.