I don’t often read books about loss and grief, so reading the memoir, “Wave,” by Sonali Deraniyagala, was no easy task. However, reading about Deraniyagala’s unfathomable loss was truly an extraordinary experience. “Wave” is about Deraniyagala’s husband, her parents, and her two sons, aged seven and five, all of whom died in a single morning in December, 2004, when the tsunami hit the resort where they were vacationing in Sri Lanka. The memoir really is two stories in one about the stunned horror of a woman who lost, in one moment, her past, present, and future and remembering the life of her family when they were all alive, happy, and unconcerned with their mortality. Sonali Deraniyagala is rescued and it becomes clearer with every passing minute that she is the only survivor of her entire family. With hopeless clarity, and somehow managing to resist sentimentality, she recalls her thoughts as the …show more content…
When Sonali remembers, and can speak the truth, she finds joy in the remembering, and in who she was with the people she loved. She can piece back together who she is by remembering who she was. The beauty of her memories, and the imaginings of her sons—Vikram would be fourteen—makes me celebrate her bravery. Ultimately this is a story about how a life gets rebuilt when everything that made it a life-the people, the relationships, the activities-are gone. Deraniyagala has to piece herself back together, and she does so, slowly, painfully, and not always gracefully. I loved her honesty when she wondered why others were alive when she had lost what appeared to be everything. She faced a moral dilemma when she realized that she was experiencing a hierarchy of grief by mourning her children and husband more than her parents. In her grief, she reevaluates herself and her ability to cope with said
The critics who perceived this book's central theme to be teen-age angst miss the deep underlying theme of grief and bereavement. Ambrosio asks the question, "Is silence for a writer tantamount to suicide? Why does the wr...
This section of the paper discusses Partha Banerjee’s criticisms to the film and argues the potential of the film to take a more activist role in working towards a communal solution rather than removing the children from Sonagachi. Partha Banerjee wrote a letter regarding the documentary Born Into Brothels to AMPAS, which is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this group organizes the Oscars. This documentary highlights Briski’s commendable outreach work however; it fails to recognize the efforts put in by the residents of Sonagachi and it i...
Mukherjee then begins to compare and contrast her sister in a subject-by-subject organization. She states, “…she clings passionately to her Indian citizenship and hopes to go home to India when she...
Looking back on the death of Larissa’s son, Zebedee Breeze, Lorraine examines Larissa’s response to the passing of her child. Lorraine says, “I never saw her cry that day or any other. She never mentioned her sons.” (Senior 311). This statement from Lorraine shows how even though Larissa was devastated by the news of her son’s passing, she had to keep going. Women in Larissa’s position did not have the luxury of stopping everything to grieve. While someone in Lorraine’s position could take time to grieve and recover from the loss of a loved one, Larissa was expected to keep working despite the grief she felt. One of the saddest things about Zebedee’s passing, was that Larissa had to leave him and was not able to stay with her family because she had to take care of other families. Not only did Larissa have the strength to move on and keep working after her son’s passing, Larissa and other women like her also had no choice but to leave their families in order to find a way to support them. As a child, Lorraine did not understand the strength Larissa must have had to leave her family to take care of someone else’s
Norman Cousins once said, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Although this statement has immense truth, any loss can bring grief and hurt to a person. Whether a loss of a loved one or a possession, losses are challenging to deal with. Three short stories in particular highlight the theme of loss and a moral lesson on overcoming it. In the short stories “Gwilan’s Harp” by Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Washwoman” by Isaac Singer, and “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry, the characters experience great loss.
a personal recollection; rather, it is an effort to offer hope and healing – a healing
The terrifying words of the prediction, like the drumbeats of the mad demon of kathakali ballets, ring in her ears and unnerve her. She knows that she is haunted by “a black and evil shadow”-her fate, and the time has come: “And four years it was now, we had been married four years..i know the time had come. It was now to be either Gautam or
who wanted to enter her life, she is left alone after her father’s death. Her attitude
While A Temporary Matter can be viewed simply as faded love connections due to the loss of a child, Jhumpa Lahiri evaluates how problematic the distinctions between marital and maternal roles are through literary terms such as visual imagery, mood, tone and foreshadowing through exemplifying how the characters portray their grief. Inside the passage, paragraph eleven beginning at “These days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up” and ending with “He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they still reached for each other 's bodies before sleeping”(2), Lahiri clarifies their marriage disputes are not just a temporary matter.
At some point in people’s lives, individuals experience loss: whether it means losing a pet, a relative, a friend, a personal belonging, etc. This loss provokes a sense of vulnerability and plays into the process of mourning. In the nonfictional novel, Precarious Life, by Judith Butler, following the events of 9/11, she brings awareness to the issue of politics and censorship and how it affects people’s view on the value of human life. Specifically, in her chapter, Violence, Mourning, Politics, Butler discusses how loss and vulnerability plays an important role in preserving the world’s humanity, especially during times with so much violence and destruction. This relation between mourning and violence is portrayed through devices such as repetition
...experiences both and finds them wanting, attempts a middle way at the price of contact with her only child, embracing 1970s liberation to live as an independent professional woman and practice philosophical authenticity. Bela, finally, may be the generation which achieves some peace through knowing the whole tragic history of the family, and balancing her ideals against pragmatic needs for stability and survival. It is unfortunate that Bela only meets her brave Indian grandmother after she is senile, and misses contact with the family’s founding struggler, her grandfather, altogether.
The author discusses the loss of his beloved son objectively; he does not take the book as a platform for expressing his anger and emotion; instead, he uses his experience as an example so people have a better understanding of why suffering happens to good people. Kushner also criticizes the way people comfort each other, terming it as more detrimental sometimes. He postulates that instea...
Bhattachrya, paints another heart-tweaking photo of a mother who tries to bury her little child alive, so that he could dispose of the hunger-torments in light of the fact that she alongside her child have been battling the vicious plague of continuous hunger for so many days. The poor mother is restrained from doing this sinful act by Kajoli’s mother as she cries her heart
Divya was sitting in the living room and sorting out the baby gifts she had received on her baby shower, which was held two days ago, on the last day of her seventh month pregnancy. Beside her, was her son Vaishak, busy in unwrapping the toys and hiding some of those which he found interesting, under the sofa. Divya’s mother who had come to look after her pregnant daughter, was preparing breakfast in the kitchen and Divya's husband had not returned from his morning walk yet.