The Lovely Coping Mechanisms

I was rather attracted to reading The Lovely Bones because it dealt with a grimmer side of life: grief. I find humanity's capability to feel so much sadness and anger after loss to be one of our most amazing traits. Many never recover after someone close has died, others go through an incredible transformation, for better or for worse. The passing of a single individual can affect so many lives in so many different ways. I do not believe happiness is that infectious.

The Lovely Bones conveys the different reactions to the death of the narrator, Susie Salmon, as she watches from heaven. Her kidnap, rape, and murder eventually lead to the disintegration of a normal, nuclear family. The family struggles to cope with life continuing after such a huge tragedy. Alice Sebold displays, through her characters, that while grief many come in many different forms, everyone will have his or her burden to bear. How he or she chooses to bear this burden is entirely up to their widely varying coping mechanisms. The characters in this novel embody truly human characteristics in different ways they cope with the similar burdens they share.

Susie's mother, Abigail, grieves several things: the loss of her daughter, the collapse of her family surrounding the death, and the loss of her life she never had the opprotunity to live. Susie's death pushes Abigail's previous, personal problem of her youth cut short by having a family into a large ordeal that brings her family down with her. Abigail spirals down into her personal turmoil. After having an affair with a detective investigating Susie's death, she leaves her family for seven years. Susie's death left Abigail selfish and unfeeling, her only way to disconnect from emotions involving others. Ms. Sebold conveys a certain aspect of grief with Abigail's character: becoming self-centered as a way to not feel emotions connected with others.

Lindsey Salmon, Susie's younger sister, grips with Susie's death in silent emotional intensity. She wills herself to take the mother position of the strong woman in the family, as Abigail has abandoned her family's feelings. Lindsey shares a physical and mental connection with Susie: her striking physical similarity to Susie, and her sisterly bond with Susie. Abigail senses the similarity between Susie and Lindsey, finds it too much to handle, and shuts Lindsey out of her life. Lindsey discovers, painfully, that the world moved on after Susie's death, and soon the town forgot about what happened to their family. Lindsey learns to lead her family and raise her younger brother when Abigail leaves and her father loses most of his will to live after Susie's death. Lindsey's character is remarkably human because though she is silent and strong, she suffers hugely. Ms. Sebold shows that even those who do not outwardly express their grief still hurt and often have more emotional burdens than others.

By the end of the novel, the grief has shaped the characters in profound ways, yet they all have learned to continue with their lives. Susie says, "These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificnet—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life." Alice Sebold, by the end of this novel, conveys that while the human feeling of grief can consume people in many different ways, people can heal through the strength of others and the strength of themselves.