In our Literature class this week we have been discussing the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” written by Jonathan Foer. In this novel we are taken on a journey narrated most of the time by a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. The story is set post 9/11 when Oskar is grieving the loss of his father and decides to embark on an urgent mission to piece together a mystery in the wake of his father’s death that he hopes will bring him closer to his father. Along the way Oskar is introduced to many interesting and diverse characters, several of who share his sadness and are grieving someone they lost as well. Oskar’s mission begins when he discovers a single key in a vase that his father kept in his room. He becomes convinced that it will lead him to something his father would want him to discover and becomes determined to figure out what that may be. He holds this key on a chain physically close to him at all times. It becomes a piece of his father that he is able to grasp and remember him with. Oskar’s father is everything in his eyes. He is his hero, his closest friend, his life coach, his partner in cracking codes and exchanging stories. When Oskar loses his father he loses so much of himself as well.
I had an experience that was close to this one that acts as another example of this incredibly poignant father-son bond. When my boyfriend passed away in 2013 I watched the extreme pain his father had to endure, and I watched as the life within him began to suffocate under his hurt and his grief. He could no longer participate in daily activities, he tried, and we formed an extremely close support system where we all were able to lean on each other, but he had no strength left to hold his self up. I watched as his initial hurt turned to anger, which then turned to confusion and with time transformed into complete and utter sadness. One of the interesting connections that I can see between Oskar and my friend’s father was their need to be comforted by some object that represented the physical feeling of the one they lost. In Oskar’s case he literally went out and tracked down every person in the city of New York with the last name Black in order to locate the lock to the key he held onto, which ultimately he believed would bring him closer to his father. With my friend’s father for quite some time after his loss he couldn’t leave the house without wearing his sons shirt, pants, shoes, hat, even cologne. He began to pick up particular words from his son’s vocabulary that he had never said in a serious context before. He had mentally convinced himself that it was possible for him to become his son. Of course this was an understandable first stage of grief and with time he left those habits behind but for a while he had to feel completely like his son in an attempt to ignore what had so abruptly become a new reality.
There seems to be a common false preconception in our society that most people mourn the same way and there are particular ways that we portray our sadness and pain to the public. This novel convinced me further and reaffirmed my personal belief that this is not the case, and in fact grief can come in an infinite number of different shapes and forms. We must understand this especially when we are tempted to judge someone without first recognizing that everyone has a story and a background that may be responsible for defining certain parts of their personality.