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The Lovely Bones Essay Example

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The Lovely Bones Essay Example
Discuss the way guilt and grief manifests in one or two characters and analyse how they deal with it.

Abigail Salmon, Susie’s mother, shows grief differently to the way Jack Salmon, Susie’s father grieves. The five stages of grief are what one should expect to happen to them when someone they love is dying or has died. The way Abigail Salmon grieves varies throughout the book and is evidently different in style to the rest of the family. The variation of Jack Salmon grieving techniques over Susie bonds with the relationship he had with her. Abigail and Jack Salmon discover through out the book that everybody grieves differently depending on how close they were to the person.

Guilt and grief are the most important aspects of reacting to death. Guilt is an affective feeling in which someone experiences conflict at having done something that one believes the other should not have done or on the other hand having not done something one believes they should have done. Grief is the thoughts and feeling that are experienced within us when someone we love dies, the internal meaning given to the experience of bereavement. Grief is fundamentally an emotional response to loss, the expression of which can include sadness, sorrow, fatigue, depression, relief, shock, anger, guilt, and anxiety. There are five stages of grieving for someone, first is shock and denial, denying that it happened or will happen. Anger, expressing big emotions towards someone or something accusing them of what happened is the second one. Thirdly, is bargaining, it often takes place before the loss. Attempting to make deals with the spouse who is leaving, or attempting to make deals with God to stop or change the loss. Begging, wishing, and praying for them to come back. Fourthly, depression, having overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, frustration, bitterness, self pity, mourning loss of person as well as the hopes, dreams and plans for the future. Feeling lack of control and numb or perhaps

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