Diversity of Grieving: The Lovely Bones

Diversity of Grieving

People have their own different ways of coping with death, whether it be death of a family member or close friend or even a pet. While people cope differently, they also grieve differently, some may show a lot of emotions, some may not. In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, 14 year old Susie Salmon is raped and murdered by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Her family grieving with her death is a good example showing that everybody grieves differently. They are not a family anymore after Susie’s death until they can cope with their grief. In The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold shows Susie’s family being torn apart with grief after Susie’s death and how hard it is for them to find their way back to being a normal family again.

Jack, Susie’s father, deals with her death in a way that makes it really hard for him to get over his daughter’s death. Not long after Susie is killed he breaks bottled ships he and Susie had made. He feels no need to keep them so he smashes them to deal with his anger, sadness, and grief: “Susie my baby girl, he said, ‘You always liked these smaller ones”(Sebold 46). He thinks of Susie while he breaks them knowing that he will never get to make any with her again. Susie watches him from Heaven breaking the bottles one by one, throwing away their memories from when she was still alive. Jack also tries to deal with his sadness and depression by finding Susie inside of his son, Buckley. He thought of it as giving his love to the living. But this was hard for him to do when the thought that he wasn’t there for his daughter when she was being killed keeps taking a toll on him: “The guilt of him, the hand of God pressing down on him ,saying, you were not there when your daughter needed you.” (Sebold 58). He felt this heavy weight on his shoulders and can’t think of anything other than how he wasn’t there. He goes into a depression where he only thinks about Susie’s death and how he wasn’t there for her.

On the other hand, Susie’s mom, Abigail, grieves with the death of her daughter in her own way. She stops giving Lindsey and Buckley any attention. Her way of coping with the Susie’s death is to zone everyone out and think of anything but the fact that Susie was dead. When the neighbors of the Salmon family light candles in Susie’s memory one year after her death, Abigail believes there is no point to join in: “We’ve had the memorial, she said, ‘that’s enough for me” (Sebold 206). Abigail shows that she does not like to show a lot of emotion about Susie’s death. She feels there is no reason to keep bringing it up and wants to think that having the memorial was enough and that everyone should stop talking about it. One way Abigail copes the death of her daughter was to have an affair with the detective who is working in Susie’s case, Len Fenerman: “The whole life lost tumbling out in an arc on that roof, clogging up her being. She needed Len to drive her dead daughter out.” (Sebold 152). She needed to get the fact that Susie was dead out of her mind. She used Len to clear her head of Susie. She starts to feel guilty over this and can’t deal with the guilt. It’s the only way she knows how to cope with her grief