Grief In Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You

The hardships of continuing life after losing someone close is indescribably difficult. I chose to explore how people are impacted by grief because I was interested in different ways grief is expressed, and the strength necessary to ultimately overcome it. Although, I have been lucky enough not to have had much interaction with death up to this point in my life, I wanted to better understand where people who have are coming from. However, another driving factor for my interest in this topic was to prepare myself; some of my grandparents have been diagnosed with cancer (nothing terminal), but in the case that I will have to face the world knowing that they are not longer, I do not want to go unarmed. Ultimately, through my research, I have

Through the refusal to accept the death, those left behind create illusions to maintain the life that they have lost, at the cost of their own. People fall victim to denial-based grief due to how satisfying the thought that the person they lost is not really gone, however this is a false joy that only leaves its victims worse than before. In Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, a mother plays with the double edged sword of denial in her dead daughter’s room, “In this room a deep ache suffuses her, as if her bones are bruised. Yet it feels good, too. Everything here reminds her of what [her daughter] could have been,” revealing, as the mother attempts to revitalize her daughter with her hopes for her daughter’s future, that an irrational solution to an impossible question (how will this mother continue her life without her daughter) often easier in the short-term than reality (Ng 73). Additionally, Gustave Flaubert expresses the consequences of such grief in his novel, Madame Bovary, by showing Charles Bovary’s progression from trying “To please [his wife], as though she were still alive, [Charles] adopted her tastes, her ideas,” to “[Charles] fell to the ground. [Charles] was dead… He opened [Charles] and found nothing” (Flaubert 304, 310). While Charles’ progression from his delusion to his death is an exaggeration reality, Flaubert exemplifies the cost of maintaining such illusions

As well, Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, presents a case of a mother in perpetual denial of her son’s death. Her husband (Keller) and other son (Chris) discuss Chris marrying the dead son’s girlfriend, “Keller: I don't want a diagram... I...I'm... She thinks he's coming back, Chris. You marry that girl and you're pronouncing him dead. Now what's going to happen to mother? Do you know? I don't,” this conversation expresses the cost of the destruction of denial-based illusions through the unnerved and fearful tone of the father’s response because he fears that with the destruction of her illusions, her own will shortly follow (Miller 17). However, solely through the end of her illusions can her path to closure begin, as expressed through the necessity for the contradiction between the two to be