I liked the Beard story a lot but I found it awfully sad. It was very descriptive and genuine so it was easy for me to imagine every detail. It reminds me of stories I would have to read in my AIDS and Epidemics class written about individuals dying of HIV from their doctor’s point of view. The story was beautiful and the part I liked most was when Jo Ann said “no matter how much you miss them they never come back once they are gone”. Literally, she was talking about the deceased, but figuratively she could have meant her husband or her collie or anyone who wasn’t playing the same role in her life that they used to. And even though her husband came back to console her, his love for her never came back. It could never come back because he didn’t love her anymore. He looked at his wife like he looked at the collie on the damp blankets. And for some reason I can visualize exactly what that must have felt like.
"The Midwest is very brown isn’t it?” says Chris’s mother to Jo Ann on the phone. Brown is the color of dead leaves and shit which makes perfect sense in this story. When you mix all the colors in the spectrum your allegedly get black but anytime I’ve tried I always got brown. This reminded me of a quote from On the Road. “There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded. At least that’s what I thought then…”

The Richards story immediately struck fear into my heart thinking that someday my mother could be like this. I’ve never had any experience with grandparents because they all died before I was born but the idea of my parents becoming senile frightens me. I could see myself becoming annoyed with my mother were she to do this and that frightens me too because I should be mature enough by now to not lose my temper with her. “But we’re not really angry at her, we’re angry at it. Whatever it is.” I hope I am mature enough by the time it happens.

I guess this is a good group of stories to read over Thanksgiving so that I can be thankful for my life and my family’s and how neither of us has reached any of these states yet.

I enjoyed the Sedaris and Strayed stories the most because I could relate to them. Not to their circumstances but perhaps to the authors’ thinking. Whenever I like a quote I write it down. These are the passages I wrote down: “It’s so rare when one knowingly does something for the last time: the last time you take a bath, the last time you have sex or trim your toenails. If you know you’ll never do it again it might be nice to really make a show of it…There must exist some middle ground, a place where one was tortured on a daily basis but still allowed a few moments of pleasure, taken wherever one could find it. That place seemed to be Raleigh, North Carolina, so why the big fuss?...You can’t brace yourself for famine if you’ve never known hunger, it is foolish to even try. The most you can do is eat up while you still can, stuffing yourself, shoveling it in with both hands and licking clean the plates, recalling every course in vivid detail…”

I liked the satirical nature of this reading. I hated the father and the way he tried to dominate and manipulate everyone else but I figure he only did that because he was scared and trying to control his wife so as not to lose her. The story’s mother reminded me somewhat of my mother, unconventional and non-conformist, minus the cigarette smoking. I think if my mother got cancer she wouldn’t tell us either. I remember a few years ago she got into a car accident and the only way I found out was when I noticed she didn’t have a car anymore. She didn’t want to scare me by telling me.

I wrote down a group of passages from the Strayed story as well: “We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Greif is a thing that we are encouraged to ‘let go of’ to ‘move on from’…. And if they don’t – if they have loved too deeply, if they wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live – well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help… We act as if all losses are equal. It is un- American to believe otherwise…But it was not to be…We loved each other but love was not enough…I thought about how if you lose a ring in a river, you are never going to get it back, no matter how badly you want it or how long you wait…But this isn’t fiction. Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about. Sometimes you wake up and find that you actually have lost your nose…”

I liked this story because the author was young. She just went through a tragic loss and she was confused and messed up and I think that everyone has stages of their life like that. Frankly I don’t believe that all losses are equal. Any losses I’ve suffered have not been as devastating as having to lose a mother however a loss is a loss and quantifying a loss doesn’t create a different reaction to the loss.

All of these stories share a similarity in losing someone you love. But for the most part they all seem unresolved as in the learning to accept this loss has not been achieved yet and may never be.