The Optimist's Daughter Summary

Death is an inevitable part of life. Though losing a loved one may seem earth shattering, life goes on. When burdened with this overpowering misery, mourners will experience the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In Eudora Welty’s, The Optimist’s Daughter, readers follow Laurel McKelva Hand as she addresses each of these stages after losing the ones closest to her.

In mourning, sufferers spend different amounts of time in each stage. Stages do not have to occur in a specific order, it is possible to move back and forth between stages (Axelrod). At the realization that death is approaching, denial is often the first stage that is experienced. Death is a tragic occurrence. The majority of people who are

victimized by losing a loved one are often unprepared for doing so. In Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, at the fear of losing her father to the same disability as her mother, Laurel reassures herself that the worst will not happen and listens to the doctor’s recurring claim that he just needs a little more time (Welty 22). As a result of this, it is an ideal model of denial for Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, creator of the five stages of grief. As Kubler-Ross’s surviving co author, David Kessler assures, denial is a coping mechanism that the human brain uses to manage extreme amounts of emotional pain. It makes the grieving process more manageable as the mourner advances to the next stage. As Laurel learns of her father’s, Judge McKelva’s, death and is standing over his corpse, she still has a brief moment of hope, believing that he surely was not dead (Welty 33). As a last effort to make sense of the situation, it is common to attempt to rationalize and deny the truth.
As the grieving process progresses, denial soon transforms into anger. Often mourners feel as if they are drowning in a sea of sorrow, but anger acts as an outlet for pain. A mourner’s anger can be directed at friends, family, the deceased, and even the mourner himself (Kessler). Welty shows readers Laurel’s struggle with anger as she attends her father’s visitation while everyone is speaking and telling honorable and exaggerated tales of the Judge. Angered, she wanted his casket closed and denied the men's’ stories (Welty 80). John Bryne, author of Learning and Memory, informs his readers that collective memory is when the past is represented by the accounts shared by a group of individuals. Memory is morphed and altered by participation in a conjoined life, different groups will have different accounts of the past (Byrne 86), this explains the exaggerated fishermen's’ tales told at the visitation. Anger is a necessary element for completing the mourning process. It acts as a channel for overwhelming emotions. Laurel was troubled and angered due to being unable to protect her father in life and in death. She could not save him from being scorned by her mother as she was dying, and she couldn’t save him from eventually remarrying to a woman who was mentally abusive and younger than Laurel. And now she couldn’t preserve his legacy the way he would have wanted (Arnold). It is a natural response to feel anger after losing a loved one. According to Kessler, the more a person in grieving feels anger, the more it starts to dissolve and allows the griever to advance to the next stage, bargaining.
Bargaining is thought to be making a deal with God. Many mourners will pray, pleading, saying they’ll be good if they could just wake up from their nightmare. They beg for God to ease their suffering (Kessler). But Laurel does not try to bargain with God. She bargains with her mind. Making a deal with her memories to block out her pain. However, in order to move on, a mourner must first feel the pain of loss. The facade Laurel had put up to ease her suffering after years of loss begins to tear down. But as she is unable to bargain with her mind, the memories come flooding back. “Memory returned like spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming (Welty 115)”. Laurel being surrounded by her childhood home has brought the memories back like spring. She has been in the bargaining stage for quite sometime after being widowed and orphaned. Kessler say it is common for those in mourning to ask the “if only” or “what if” questions. Laurel began to ask, “If Phil had lived(Welty 154)?” But she knew that her husband was gone and he was only a memory. Herbert Wray, author of Mourning and Memory, informs that complicated grief is a disorder that torments its inhabitants and makes them feel as if they are stuck in the past. People who suffer from complicated grief find it harder to remember the past. Suffers have trouble believing in a future for themselves (Wray). Memories of her past that were altered by a childlike perspective, where brought to the surface. She remembers her parents as young and strong and their relationship even stronger. Laurel thought of her parents as invincible, just as any child (Welty 133). But after years of hiding from her sorrow, she remembers them for who they died as, imperfect and stubborn. Richard Thompson wrote that many believe memory is exactly how the occurrence happened, but this is very far from reality. An individual can unconsciously convince themselves that an occurrence actually happened or that it happened a certain way, when actually, it did not (Thompson 6). Laurel remembers her mother’s long illness and eventual death, and during it how it strained and tested her parents’ relationship (Wells). She comes to an understanding that her parents were not the perfect saints that she remembered.
After bargaining, a mourner is finally able to feel the pain of loss at full force.

As Laurel begins to enter the next stage, memories of her dead loved ones begin to flood back. John Byrne states that flashbulb memories are vivid memories that seem unforgettable. Most flashbulb memories are formed from traumatic events such as a death (Byrne 419). Sometimes, mourners will turn away from their emotions and avoid all objects that remind them of their loved one and their death. But the deceased may appear alive in the mourner’s dreams says Daniel Goleman of The New York Times. After Laurel finds a letter from her grandmother who mentions Laurel as a child, she finally breaks down. Her grandmother had wrote when Laurel was a teenager, that if she could send Laurel a pigeon, who as a child she had a great interest in, she would (Welty 153). This small memory of her childhood finally brings Laurel to tears. When she is finally able to mourn, she sees her husband Phil as he looks at her with eyes longing for his unlived life (Welty 154). He was taken away by the war without a warning. Their short, perfect love was ripped from her arms and she was left without even a body to mourn over. Goleman informs that a sudden death makes mourning difficult. Studies show that a person whose spouse died suddenly were more anxious and depressed even two to four years after the loss that those whose spouse died from a drawn out illness. Mourners will go through a review of their life with their passed loved one, then they will begin to move one. Those who had less of a connection with the deceased will have the most memories after the death, but the ones distressed by the death usually take longer for the vivid memories to flow due to traumatization. Intense thoughts of sadness and memories makes it hard for the mourner to concentrate. An intense need for the company of the deceased develops, it is the last effort of denying the death. This need eventually leads to the emotional

acceptance of the death (Goleman). The barrier of pain and shock that Laurel has pushed back has finally broke down and all of her emotions are hitting her all at once. “[She] wept in grief for love and for the dead (Welty 154).” After years of suppressing emotion, she is no longer a rock wall and finally she cries for all she has lost.
Lastly, mourning shifts to the fifth and final stage with acceptance. This stage is commonly confused with being “all right” with the death. Mourners will usually never be okay with what happened to their loved one (Kessler). Instead, they accept that it happened and try to move on. The article, “Grief and the Grieving Process,” states that it is beneficial for the recovery of mourning to allow oneself to feel the pain of loss instead of suppressing it. In order to move on, first an individual must mourn and remember the love for the deceased. Emotional recovery requires that the mourner form a healthy relationship with the memories associated with the deceased, in a way that they are able to continue their own lives after the death. Holding onto the past rather than allowing the growth of a new relationship with memories of the deceased can create difficulties for this task (“Grief and the Grieving Process”). Now that Laurel has allowed herself to mourn she can begin to move on with her life. Welty describes this process as she explains, “The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself, and it began to flow again (Welty 154).” All the feelings and emotions she had suppressed finally emerged and she is able to express her sorrow that she has ignored for too long. Laurel has come to realize that she has wronged both her parents and Phil by trapping them in her fantasy of perfection. She had refused to imagine a desperation in Phil’s death just as her father had refused to recognize the desperation in her mother’s death (Arnold). Welty represents Laurel’s struggle to escape the past and finally move on by portraying it symbolically as a chimney swift-a small bird that constructs its nests in chimneys-trapped inside the family home the night before Laurel’s departure to Chicago. The memories are caught in Laurel’s unchangeable idea of the past, just as the bird is caught her home. Her releasing the bird outside is symbolic for moving on (Arnold). As she is getting ready to return Chicago, Fay, her father’s new wife, returns. Laurel finally lets out her feelings and speaks highly of her family (Welty 176). This shows her love for them, but at the same time it shows her finally embracing their memories so she can move on. Fay does not want Laurel to take anything from the house. She needs the objects to feel connected to the Judge because she never shared important memories with him as Laurel did (Wells). Welty writes, “Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands (Welty 179).” It is important to let go and move on with one’s life and keep the memories of the deceased to look back on. The dead are saved by being released into memory. There is no purpose for holding onto physical objects. Loved ones do not live in inanimate thing but in the thoughts and memories of the surviving (Arnold). “Grief and the Grieving Process”, informs that mourning is considered to be complete when the person is able to experience pleasures, do new things, look forward to events, and when memories of the deceased no longer induce physical responses of sorrow and pain, although the occasional feeling of sadness may remain. Laurel has come to the understanding that they were a family of relatively helpless people. They depended on one another. That is what made them a strong and loving family (Welty 176). She leaves her childhood home optimistic about the future and at peace knowing she has lived a blessed life.
No two people have the same grieving process. In Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, readers take a look inside the mind of Laurel McKelva Hand as she conquers each of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Welty helps readers to understand the difficulty of reaching acceptance after losing a loved one. In mourning, life may seem hopeless, but it is a necessary part to obtaining a normal and happy life once more.