A Lasting Connection

At first glance, Miles, otherwise known as Pudge, the gawky, awkward, self-conscious teenage protagonist of John Green’s novel Looking for Alaska, was not someone I’d choose as a friend. I found him obnoxious; I couldn’t relate to him at all, a similar experience to my inability to understand  Holden Caulfield at first when reading Catcher in the Rye; sometimes teenage boys seem like another species to me. I live with one, and I still can’t quite figure him out. However, when I look past Pudge’s sexual fantasies and persistent desire to conform, I found that we share something essential, something that not many teenagers do: the heart-wrenching, mind-boggling experience that is grief. Though everyone experiences grief in a different way, I found common ground with Pudge, where loss meets youth.

At age ten, when my dad died from Hodgkin's Disease, one of the most taxing parts of my grief was my inability to connect with the people around me. My mom and several other family members were there for me, but as soon as he died, I felt distanced from my peers. In my diary several months following his death, I wrote: “I want to talk to my friends about dad, but how? They’d probably just say ‘it’s okay’ or ‘think on the good side.’ I really wish they could [understand]. But they can’t.” One of my most distinct memories in the early weeks of loss was when my friend came up to me and asked, “Do you still miss your dad?” I was shocked; I couldn’t believe that my friend thought I could move on so quickly. I soon realized, though, that it wasn’t that my friends didn’t care, but that they hadn’t experienced struggles that would enable them to empathize with me. Grief writer Jill Brooke explains that “it’s important to experience your feelings and express them,” but it wasn’t easy for me to do this without having people to which I could relate (Brooke 18). Then reading Looking for Alaska,  I found an unlikely connection in Pudge, who loses his friend Alaska in a car accident.

Pudge also desperately tries to find people who could understand how it feels to lose a loved one. His conversations with his parents over the phone regarding Alaska’s death are brief and shallow. However, his conversations with his friend the Colonel, who was also grieving Alaska’s death, are profound. He feels relieved when he learns that they share similar irrational feelings. The Colonel says tells Pudge that he “sometimes liked it that she was dead.” Pudge was pleased that he wasn’t the only one to feel such strange and awful things” (Green 213). I would have loved to have a connection similar to that of Pudge and the Colonel, especially in the height of my grief. 
Beyond my disconnect from my peers, my initial grief was characterized by a heavy, deflated feeling that enveloped my being, a feeling which Ashley Prend describes as “primal pain… dull and aching one minute and searing and stabbing the next” (Prend 28). In my journal from the month after my dad’s death, I described my pain as a “shiver that ran through my body.” I then wrote, “I think that shiver is what real pain feels like.” I felt this “shiver” when I first found about about my dad’s death, but many other instances triggered the “shiver:” a slow song in a minor key on the radio, a sighting of a father-daughter pair, a mentioning of his name. When Alaska dies, Pudge feels “a dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.” He feels trapped in his inability to maintain stability. Even in moments that should have been joyful, that pain “in his gut” would not budge.

As I progressed through my grief, a dense pang of pain mixed with an overarching sense of fear. Ashley Prend attributes this fear to “a dawning realization that you can’t control your world” (Prend 30). My mind buzzed with questions about what path my life would take without my dad. These questions prompted unease, but no answers. In my diary, I wrote, “I just want a huge hug from him NOW! Why couldn’t his cancer wait 30 more years? Why not? Why did this happen to him? Too many questions but no answers.” One of the scariest parts about coping with loss was coming to the realization that answers weren't going to come. At the end of the novel, Pudge attempts to make sense of Alaska’s death, sorting through what components contributed to her being, and what happens to those components in death. He thinks about the parts of her that go beyond her physical body and tosses around the thought that those parts “have to go somewhere” and “cannot be destroyed” (Green 220). Neither Pudge nor I find answers. We find coping tools and develop greater understanding, but answers remain unfound. As unsettling as that is, I have learned that closure isn’t necessary. In Nancy Berns’s book, she describes the drawbacks of our societal “rush to end grief” (Berns 7). Pudge and I can both lead fulfilled lives without this closure for which we both once searched in desperation. 

Literature’s ability to create lasting connections between readers and characters comforts me. Just as my grief will never fully disintegrate, just as my memories and longing for a relationship to my dad will last, John Green has captured Pudge’s grief forever in writing. As the years since my dad’s death sail past me, people stop asking about my loss. It fades to the back of their minds, though it remains at the front of mine. My friends may not always be there to help me work through loss, but Pudge will be. He may be fictional, but in Pudge, I’ve found what I’ve been searching for for years: a friend who understands.

Works Cited

Berns, Nancy. Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2011.  Print.

Brooke, Jill. Don't Let Death Ruin Your Life: A Practical Guide to Reclaiming Happiness after the     Death of a Loved One. Toronto: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Green, John. Looking for Alaska: A Novel. New York: Dutton Children's, 2005. Print.
 
Prend, Ashley Davis. Transcending Loss: Understanding the Lifelong Impact of Grief and How to Make It Meaningful. New York: Berkley, 1997. Print.

You Get It

What's Left?

Grief made a home in the body that once was my shelter;

I felt her ripping my guts

Gnawing at my bones

Grasping my heart in her slimy tail

Compressing my lungs

Until only a miniscule pocket of air remained.

Now grief has slithered out of me

And feeds on the body of another victim.

When she first left I felt hollow.

Devoid.

Blank and barren.

Though vicious,

Grief had been reliable

Always there

Steadfast

True.

Now in her absence

All that remains

Are torn guts

Decaying bones

A crumpled heart

Smashed lungs

And a longing to fill the empty space.

Dear Pudge

May 18th, 2014

Dear Pudge,

    Right now it probably feels like your world is crashing down. You believe that Alaska is “just dead. Just darkness” (Green 219), just as I believed that my dad was “gone for good. Not his soul, his memory, or what he gave us, but everything else.”

Yes she is gone, yes it hurts, and quite honestly Pudge, it’s hard to spin this in a positive way. I doubt you want to. You likely shake your head when your peers tell you that “Alaska is in a better place” or that “you are going to get through this” or that “you are so lucky compared to most people.”  Many people, including myself, have attempted to focus on the benefits that come from the death of a loved one. And, I’m not going to deny, there are quite a few. Bereaved children often have a mature perspective on the world. As Jill Brooke explains in her book, grief makes children feel like outsiders, and this allows them to see the world “in a nontraditional way.” This bereavement prompts abstract thought, which “builds empires because you see what others may not, and bereavement spurs the child to be introspective” (Brooke 120). She goes on to mention many successful people, including great leaders, thinkers, and artists who lost a parent at a young age. Among this list were Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Pudge, I’m not trying to say that you are going to become president of the USA because you are experiencing grief. The truth is, you probably won’t. (Sorry if that comes as a shock.) What I am saying is that although it’s painful, and to be honest, it might continue to be painful for much or all of your life, you might gain a perspective that is unique from that of your peers as a result. One way that I see this manifested in me is that I don’t conform to my peers. I know myself, I know my limits, I am confident in my choices, and I’m not easily swayed. Knowing yourself and respecting yourself is important, Pudge. It’s really important.

    So, yes, maybe you’ll gain a unique perspective from this. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. My dad died eight years ago. Eight years is a pretty long time. Yet, I still think about him every day. I still long for him to be a part of my life. There are moments when my dad’s death will come up in conversation somehow, and my peers will change the subject as quickly as possible. What they don’t understand is that I still want to talk about it. By talking about it, in a way, I can keep him alive. I especially feel sad at special times in my life. As I near the end of my senior year, I’m at a turning point in my life. I would LOVE to have my dad there to see what I have accomplished. I want him to be a proud dad, and he doesn’t get to be. When I look out the window into the park next to my house, I see little girls playing with their dads in the sandbox, and it kills me (metaphorically, of course.) I would give anything to hit the rewind button on my life story and sit in the sandbox with my dad. But of course I know that will never happen. This is my life. I don’t have a father. I am fatherless. And I hate that. I doubt I will ever feel okay about that. But you know what, Pudge? I have learned that it’s okay not to have closure. Acceptance can come without closure. In a book by Nancy Berns, she explains that in our society, there is an emphasis on rushing to end grief and that this rush hurts us. She says that “the closure frame may be appealing since it keeps grief and loss tidy and short lived, but it is a poor reflection of what many people experience when grieving a deep loss” (Berns 166). She goes on to say that some people have emotions and memories that they “never want to pack away,” and that’s okay. There is a social expectation that grief will follow a pattern, but that’s not the case. People grieve in all different ways. I and many others can’t stand the “stages of grief” that we learn about in Psychology class. There is no roadmap. You can’t condense grief into “stages.”

    Pudge, I know I just rambled quite a bit. The main point I want you to take away is that it is okay to not fold your feelings into piles. Maybe your feelings are strewn across the floor. That’s okay. However you feel, be kind to yourself. Find ways to release. As Ashley Prend explains in her book, “No one can sustain intense feelings twenty-four hours a day” (Prend 27). Let yourself have a break from your grief, but also know that your grief is acceptable, no matter what form it takes.

    I’m thinking about you.

    I’m not going to say that I know how you feel, because I don’t. But even though I don’t totally understand you, and my grieving process doesn’t 100% match yours, I feel connected to you in a way that I don’t to most other teenagers. Maybe you can find some peace in that knowledge.

Yours Truly,

Natalie Jacobson (Who by the way, still doesn’t have the answers)

riegf

A plastic ball filled with torn shreds of paper, which includes excerpts from my diary, feelings I wrote down during grief group, and quotes from Looking for Alaska.

Reflective Letter

Dear Readers,

The creative process for this multi-genre project was an important one for me. When I started reading Looking for Alaska, I had no idea what my project’s focus would be. To be honest, I didn’t even know what the book was about. All I knew was that I wanted to give John Green a try, as people seem to LOVE him. I get it now. He has a fantastic way of creating complex characters to whom many teens can relate. When I reached the late middle of the book and realized that loss was an integral part of the story, I knew I wanted to explore grief. As I read, I found myself connecting to Pudge, feeling almost as though I knew him as I saw him grieve. So much of what he experienced, I had experienced through the loss of my dad. I wanted my project to center around the connection that I felt between me and Pudge and what that teaches me about grief.

In the few years following my dad’s death, I kept a diary in which I wrote about feelings in my everyday life, many of them pertaining to my loss. My golden thread for this project is excerpts from my diary, which I have incorporated in every genre plus my expository essay. I chose to thread my diary excerpts throughout my piece to show an honest, raw portrayal of my grief. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how I felt a few years ago, so to see my emotions in writing word-for-word helps to resurface those feelings. I want to explain where my golden thread is in each of my genres in case that isn’t clear. My poem titled “What’s Left?” is a portrayal of grief from my perspective, much of which is also how Pudge feels. The three words that are highlighted in grey in that poem were pulled from my diary. My next genre, titled “You Get It,” is a series of text messages between me and Pudge. I created this because besides my grief group, from which I did not form lasting friendships, I’ve never had friend who has lost a loved one. I wanted to see what it would feel like to have a conversation over text messages with someone experiencing grief. I actually found it to be a quite comforting conversation. When I talk about visiting Whitewater in the text message, I pulled those sentences straight from my diary. My third genre titled “Dear Pudge,” is a letter from me to Pudge, in which I talk about my experiences with loss and try to give him some helpful advice, incorporating my own perspective and supporting that with some of my research. I start off the letter with an excerpt from my diary showing how I felt when he first died. Lastly, my final genre, the art piece titled “riegf,” (the word “grief” scrambled up) is a plastic ball filled with torn shreds of paper, which includes excerpts from my diary, feelings I wrote down during grief group, and quotes from Looking for Alaska. The point of this piece is to show that grief is not one dimensional; grief is complicated and confusing, and it’s virtually impossible to sort together the disjointed pieces that make it up. It shows that grief is not just “sadness.” It is far more complex than that. This piece shows the layers that compose grief and the overlaps between my grief and Pudge’s grief in a visual way. Even though this project has presented a connection between me and Pudge and similarities in our grieving processes, this does not mean that grief happens in a universal way; I've discovered that grief vastly differs from person to person.

This project was an important, introspective process for me. Thinking about my experiences with loss 
and writing about them are coping mechanisms for me, and the more I do it, the better I can understand myself.

Thanks for reading!

Natalie