Looking for Alaska: In Process Post #2

After finishing Looking for Alaska, I am looking forward to exploring the topic of grief more in depth. Grief is a topic that is very personal to me. After my dad’s death, I went through a long, hard process of sorting through my grief. Even though my “grieving period” is technically long over, the loss of a loved someone is something that stays with a person for their whole life. I don’t think I’ve gone a day without thinking about my dad, and I don’t think I ever will. That’s something that’s so complex about death- the seemingly neverending nature of its impacts.

I think it would be interesting for me to learn about the components that make up the grieving process and then see how my grieving process and that of Alaska’s friends, especially Pudge compare or contrast from my research about grief. Looking back at my journal from after my dad’s death, I see lots of similarities to Pudge’s experience following Alaska’s death. The death of a close friend is very different from the death of a father, but the similarities are leading me to realize that there might be some universal symptoms of grief. Prend says in her book that “primal pain” is at the root of grief. In my journal from the month after my dad’s death, I described my pain as “shiver that ran through my body.” I then wrote, “I think that shiver is what real pain feels like.” Pudge also feels a painful physical sensation unlike anything he has felt before. He describes “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.”

Another similarity that I found is the intense desire that people dealing with grief have to connect with others and have a shared experience. When my dad died, I felt like I was the only kid with a dead dad, and I longed to find people who could understand what I was going through. In my journal I wrote: “I wish I could talk to my friends about it but they just don’t understand. They’ve never had something like this happen to them.” A couple of months later, when I began attending a grief group, I wrote: “It’s great to be around people who have had the same experience. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who’s suffering.” In the book Don’t Let Death Ruin Your Life, author Jill Brook explains that “it’s important to experience your feelings and express them...don’t hold it in. Talk about your anger, talk about the unfairness, talk about how much you miss your loved one.” This is why grief group was so comforting to me and why I felt such a disconnect from my friends; I wanted to express my feelings, but only in an environment  that felt comfortable and supportive through shared experience. Pudge feels the same way. He tells his friend, the Colonel, who is also grieving Alaska’s death, "Sometimes I liked it...Sometimes I liked it that she was dead." The Colonel asks, "You mean it felt good?" Pudge responds, "No. I don't know. It felt..pure…. It's natural. I mean, it must be natural." Then Pudge thinks, “It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.” This connection that these grieving friends share helps them feel connected and enables them to express their grief together. I find it so interesting that I’m discovering similarities between the grieving process of a ten year old with a dead father and a seventeen year old with a dead friend. I don’t think that types of grief are universal and formulaic, but there are shared feelings and processes that coincide with grief.