The loss

The loss of a loved one is always a tremendous tragedy for any person. Love can cope with anything but death and that is a law. Many people all over the world try hard to deal with their grief. Some people cry, some want to kill themselves, some feel apathy and some feel a weird calmness that often ends up with a truly broken heart. “Young wife” by Derek Walcott and “The management of grief” by Bharati Mukherjee are two examples of how different people feel when they lose a very dear to their heart person. These two stories are written from different people and have different plots, but there is one thing that unites them –it is the despair that lives in their souls, the impossibility to do anything to change the going of the things in general and their lives in particular.
In “Young wife” by Derek Walcott we do not jus see but also feel the pain a man, that lost his young wife and the children that lost their beloved mother. The poem starts with the words: “Make all your sorrows neat. Plum pillows, soothe the corners of her favorite coverlet” [1,681]. This beginning empathizes that though the woman is gone – everything that was dear to her now is dear to him too. The things she loves still have a part of her attention and heart and by this become a part of her. The phrases “Ah, but the mirror – the mirror; which you believe has seen; the traitor you feel you are –; clouds, though you wipe it clean!” – mean that a man feels to be a traitor to be alive, to live and exist without her [1,681]. He holds his grief inside him and says: “the children must not hear”, he does not dare to open up the drawers; because he knows want pain and despair will cost him to do so. The life of this man has stopped, time has stopped. He still puts a knife and the fork for her at the dinner-table. He does not just want her to be here with him, but he knows she is. I just cannot be that she is not! His new life is described by these words: “The weight we bear on this heavier side of the grave brings no comfort” [1,682]. The life of the family is empty, and they feel a profound pain knowing that their dear woman will not ever come back and they are alone forever. For them “nothing takes her place; loved and now deeper loved” [1,682].
“The management of grief” by Bharati Mukherjee is a story of another type of grief. A story of a woman Shaila who as many of her friends lost her dear men in a tragedy caused by a bomb in the Metro, apolitical issue. Shaila lives in memories: “They remind me of when my sons were small, on Mother’s Day…they would make big, sloppy omelets. I would lie in bed pretending I didn’t hear them” [1,626]. Everybody around her is hysterical; all her friends have lost someone of the plane that was going to India for the vacations. She feels “not peace, just a deadening quiet” [1,627].Her life becomes a contradiction between her own tragedy and its political underwater. When the appointee of the provincial government asks her to become an example of strength for her community what she thinks is: “I wish I could scream, starve, walk into Lake Ontario, and jump from a bridge” [1,629]. She thinks of herself as of a freak and she cannot do anything with the terrible calm that does not go away. She griefs and her grief is joined by the grief of her friends. She hopes and the same time knows that it is useless. She sees how political powers try to “enter” the pain of all those people who lost some one in the Metro tragedy and she senses that her husband and her boys are sill with her. She starts her life for new selling their house and looking for charity to do without knowing what is going to happen or what she is going to do: “I wait, I listen and I pray, but Vikram has not returned to me”[1,638].
Both of the stories represent the deepest grief of the hearts of the people. They are very much alike in the way that in the first one the man finds his sense of life in his children and in the second one Shaila finds her sense of life in trying to help others and continuing her lie in the memory of her boys and her husband. They both continue to live, still having a place for their loved ones near them, still having he shadows of the past behind them.