The idea of death is haunting, but death lingers. It surrounds people everywhere; it happens everyday. Yet it is one of the most controversial, complex concepts out there that people struggle with constantly. Thomas Lynch, the author of the essay “Into the Oblivion” addresses the concept of death with such eloquence on the issue. In his essay, Lynch discusses the concept of death with not only the dealing with the body, but with the effects of what happens when a person of our own reality dies. Lynch begins his essay with an example of a woman in the beginning of time who first experiences losing her husband. He talks about how she would react and the possibilities of what she would do and how she responds to him passing. This example carries …show more content…
a tone throughout Lynch’s essay raising questions: How should we act? What is the proper response to this? What do we do with the body? How should the body be treated? These questions are persistent in coming up while reading his essay. Lynch’s essay is on a sensitive subject that causes feelings to emerge, but not just because of the topic he chose. His examples, his wording or language, and his tone forces the audience to endure a roller coaster of emotions. Lynch uses examples to evoke an emotion in the reader. He applies an example of cremation, an already fragile topic, to cause the reader to take a moment to rethink about the subject at hand. “When you see the elderly sister whose own children couldn’t come and get her...,”(Lynch 742) already being a solemn situation where the sister had to come and receive her sister’s ashes when the deceased’s own children would not come and get them insinuates that the children could just not care or struggle with the fact she is dead. Either way it causes the readers to possibly think about the example in a deeper manner as to what influenced this scene to happen.
Lynch also refers to the ashes of the deceased as “her” which forces readers to envision the woman as a person rather than her just being dead, that she was someone once. “...flips the button to open the trunk, and then reconsiders and goes to the back door and opens it up, and then thinks better of it and closes it again, when she goes to the front-seat passenger door, opens it up, places the box on the front seat, and then clicks a seat belt around it.”(Lynch 742) She struggles, at first this woman sees her sister as ash, not her sister, but as the example proceeds the one could notice that the woman ponders, “Should she be in the back or trunk? Is she being respected that way?” The woman ends up putting the urn in the front seat with the seat belt buckled around her sister. With this anecdote, Lynch is trying to demonstrate that the death of someone affects the individual on a level that even the individual may not be aware of until it actually happens. No one can tell someone else how to experience loss because it is specific to that person. Lynch does not tell his audience what the woman is thinking, if the scenario is true, or even his own …show more content…
perspective of the situation. All he does is share a short story in a certain way evoking emotional thoughts. Lynch furthers this subtle manipulation by using another example of an Episcopalian deacon who is of ethical credibility of the dead said, “It’s okay, it’s not her. That’s just a shell,”(Lynch 743) to a mother of a teenager who had died of leukemia. She then hits the deacon and replies, “I’ll tell you when it’s just a shell. For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.”(Lynch 743) Lynch uses this example to reel in his audience, the anecdote was about a teenager, not someone of old age and a disease of cancer that has taken countless lives. It triggers feelings to come to the surface and causes people to gasp, question, be angry, sympathetic, however it may have caused one to feel it caused one to feel. It served it’s purpose as the climax of Lynch’s point: the individual faces the dead how they believe it, whether their spirit lives on or if their body is a shell, it matters only to that specific person, to how they perceive their loved one as dead. Each person faces the concept of death different from the next, what may be comforting to one may be insulting to another. We’re all different. Appealing to as many people as possible is difficult, Lynch may have a target audience, but even the general audience he is specifying his essay to are all different people. In order to appeal to his audience, Lynch must use certain language to lure in his readers. When he uses examples or anecdotes he becomes sympathetic in his wording, his language changes. Referencing to my second paragraph the first example I shared Lynch used “her” instead of it or them or the urn. He wanted the reader to feel that the ash was somebody once. Outside of his examples, Lynch has a matter of fact language. He will use the word “dead” repeatedly, this could come off harsh, someone may use “passed on” or “passed” or “deceased” could work as well. Instead he uses the word “dead.” By doing this Lynch is trying to convey a variety of emotions. In one aspect he is sympathetic, but in another aspect he is lacking emotion. This causes the reader to see his essay in a new light of frustration and empathy. One is not just experiencing one emotion, but instead several to better understand his theory on the concept of death. This array of emotions that Lynch causes is also from his tone in his essay.
As I stated in the prior paragraph Lynch projects a matter of fact language in his essay, but also sympathy in his examples and towards the end of the essay, this is also his tone. With this mixture of sympathy and almost cold demeanor, Lynch is able to force the readers to feel what he wants them to feel at a particular time when he says it. Lynch’s overall tone, however, is respect. He has respect for the dead in how they are to be treated or viewed. Lynch also has an amount of respect for how the living will respond to someone's death. With that being said the author does manipulate in a way of targeting certain emotions. After explaining the anecdote of the woman who is the first woman to be widowed Lynch said, “The dead do not care.”(Lynch 742) He declares this with authority, “The dead do not care,”(Lynch 742) and moves on with his explanation. The statement is short, powerful, It’s almost as if he slaps the reader with this fact that the dead do not care. It’s strong and has a mighty impact. Another statement made by Lynch rather being forceful, he is kind and tapping into our inner curiosity posing a new idea, “The bodies of the newly dead are not debris or remnant, nor entirely icon or essence. They are rather changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our images and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did
the words of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, and with honor.”(Lynch 743) Lynch starts his essay off coming off cold and detached, but as the examples strengthen and the essay progresses he ends his essay with that statement. An idea that could very well spark respect in one. Respect that could give the reader a new outlook on just how they view the dead and as well as the way of the living. The examples, language, and tone work together creating a harmony that the reader could easily pick up on. They support one another being applied in differing ways in order to urge new thoughts and emotions to have more of an impact. Lynch is very aware of how people respond to their loved ones dying, he understands that each person acts in a way that only they can understand. He made a statement that explains that he does understand, he says, “We are all haunted, properly and happily in some cases, not only by their memories, but also by their remnants.”(Lynch 742) People are only human, they feel what they experience and it can’t be clearly described by someone else who is not them. Their experience is their own, even though death affects everybody at one point in their life, it can never be the same as someone else's. The concept of death tends to stay with an individual when someone in their life has passed on. It is unimaginable when it happens, but it happens. It is the one of the most well known events to occur in a person’s lifetime. Yet, the idea of someone actually dying and what happens to them or what the body symbolizes is baffling. As people continue to progress they have religion, science, or any other belief to help grasp this concept, but in the end death is a mystery. How one understands the effects of a loved one dying is truly diverse. There is a certain amount of respect for death in our society. As much fear, curiosity, or anger one may have about death, there is also respect. The respect for the unknown and how it could change anyone. Lynch has respect for the dead, he sees it as a new reality for people. The reality that death could bring one to life.
She opens up her essay by saying “How surprised [Yorick] would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”(Mitford) Funerals are meant to protect people from seeing what kind of toll death has on their loved one; to remove the scars of being human. Kubler-Ross touches on this when she says “The more we are making advancements in science, the more we seem to fear and deny the reality of death. How is this possible? We use euphemisms, we make the dead look as if they were asleep” (Kubler-Ross) which connects to her opinion that death is feared and people take responsibility when a loved one dies, even if they had no impact on their death. The eradication of the sense of death is the key reason why the deceased are embalmed. Clifton Bryant discusses that the reason why people want to have their dead embalmed is because of “death anxiety”, that it is the collective phrase for all the different and complex fears of death. He later states that death anxiety is why we tend to have “death denial” and why we tend to avoid it wholly. “Likewise, the use of metaphors or euphemisms that serve to soften the harshness of death (e.g., passed away, deceased, expired) clearly represents a culturally approved attempt to deny or camouflage death's impact on our daily lives.”(Bryant) This reflects well on the point Mitford makes, when she says “[The funeral director] put on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death played no part whatsoever” (Mitford) Kubler-Ross feels that death being ever increasingly more taboo the more
The interpretations of what comes after death may vary greatly across literature, but one component remains constant: there will always be movement. In her collection Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey discusses the significance, permanence and meaning of death often. The topic is intimate and personal in her life, and inescapable in the general human experience. Part I of Native Guard hosts many of the most personal poems in the collection, and those very closely related to the death of Trethewey’s mother, and the exit of her mother’s presence from her life. In “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey examines the definition of “home” as a place of lament, in contrast to the comforting meaning in the epitaph beginning Part I, and the significance
In Susan Mitchell’s poem “The Dead”, the speaker describes the life of a dead person to show that those we lose aren’t truly gone. The poem starts out talking about what dead people do in their afterlife, starting to form a picture in the reader’s head. Towards the middle, she starts using personal connections and memories associated with what the dead are doing. This shows us that they will always be there to remind us of memories shared together. At the end of the poem, the reader shows us that she is talking about someone who has passed that was close to her in her childhood. Perhaps Mitchell wrote this trying to get over the loss of a loved one, showing that they will never be forgotten. The poem has a
A horrific aspect of life that many people have a difficult time dealing with is death. The thought of death scares people because as humans we do not have a way to comprehend something that we cannot test, see or even have a grasp of. When a person loses a loved one they get scared by this reality of that they do not know where they are going and when they make it there how will it be for them. In William Faulkner's book, As I Lay Dying, we go through the process at which a family loses a “loved” one and we follow the family all the way until the deceased, Addie Burden, is buried in Jefferson. In As I Lay Dying you see the steps of grieving are different for many people and some of the people will come out destroyed and others without a scratch. The character Cash goes through a process of grief, odd to most in his way of grief we do not see pain because of the pressure he puts on himself to finish the journey for the family. Cash’s brother, Jewel, seems to snap from the pain of losing his mother and he let the pain ingulf his life. Finally, the last
What does it feel like to die? Does it hurt the person or the loved ones left behind? Alexandra Kleeman’s short story ‘You, Disappearing’ gives the reader a sense of death and it’s possible outcomes while giving the tale of fear and love. While some are concerned of their own demise, others give no thoughts towards time and when it will end. Kleeman writes in a strong figurative language, for example, death is hard not be concerned about due to there being no way to fully understand the spiritual and physical aspects to why it happens and seemingly enough, those who know are already dead. The main character in this short story is strongly in love with her deceased partner, and represents herself through the story with a constant need of approval and appreciation of her own life. Portraying the fear of loss by an apocalyptic setting, Kleeman grants characterization to seemingly unrelated objects by tying them together from senses and memories in her short story, “You, Disappearing.”
The presence of death in the novel looms over the characters, making each of them reflect on the
The funeral was supposed to be a family affair. She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
Death has feelings as much as any human, imagining, getting bored, distracted, and especially wondering (350, 243, 1, 375 respectively). Odd, one could say for an eternal metaphysical being. But then again, not that queer once having considered how Death spends his time. He is there at the dying of every light, that moment that the soul departs its physical shell, and sees the beauty or horror of that moment. Where to a human witnessing a death first hand (even on a much more detached level than our narrator) can easily be a life changing event, Death is forced to witness these passings for nearly every moment of his eternal life. Emotional overload or philosophical catalyst? Death gains his unique perspective on life through his many experiences with the slowly closing eyelids and muttered last words. Yet in this...
... imagines the suffering of the lynching and its impact on them as “Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull” (line 30), thus recognizing the true potential of sympathy and empathy as far as the human experience and emotions are concerned.
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
He quotes them stating, “Blessed be God for he created Death!…and the Death is at rest and peace…And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease” (Lines17-20). The audience can easily decipher through this quote that the mourners did not harbor anger or an attitude of bitterness. Rather, the mourners obtain an attitude of acceptance. The tone in this quote remains the same as it does throughout the poem. Therefore, the audience can tell that the mourners’ perspective of death was not positive, but at the very same circumstance, they understood it was something out of their control, in which they transferred their emotions to God by praising Him (Line
The Greek philosopher Plato once said that “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” It was as if he was predicting the American Revolution before it happened! The American Revolution accumulated many unforgettable heroes, Thomas Lynch Jr. being one of them, from the time it started in 1775 and ended in 1783.
Lewis Thomas reaches out to all victims in death’s reach to assuage their fear of dying. Thomas wants his readers to understand that they cannot escape death; it is an “indispensible part of living.”
Kaufman’s chapter on “Transforming Time” presented many truths most of do not want to think about. Even though we all know the inevitably of death; most of us cling to life. This is not an unusual phenomenon, but what is compelling is the perception of death. Allowing your loved one to die a “good” death verses a “bad” one. The author presented two illustrations of families faced with a loved one who is dying. One such illustration was Mrs. Brown and her husband. Mrs. Brown who had “been married fifty-six years” noted her husband was “the only thing I have.” (page 111) In making this statement she acknowledged that she wanted to hold on to him for as long as she could. The perplexing element arises, when asked by the medical team, what life sustaining measures to take; her response was “I’ll leave it to God’s will.” Unfortunately, for a medical team this is not a definitive response. The uncertainty of what to do still lingers.
The idea that something exists after death is uncertain in this poem, saying this, it is important that the point of view is that of the observer. The ...