Remembering the Living

Author's Note: This essay is written to explain how one death "ruins" many people's lives, more than we think. In this essay I talk about the book "The Lovely Bones" and a real life experience.

Every day hundreds of people die.  Some are murders, some are health problems, some are just natural, but all of them are deaths. And tagging along with each and every one of these deaths is an army of grieving friends and family members. When thinking about a person’s death, we tend to focus in on how they are probably in a better place, or how they got cheated out of life, and all the thoughts of others lives get pushed to the back of our minds. When in reality, a loss of a loved one affects many more people than we think.

The book The Lovely Bones  is written focusing on the murder of Susie Salmon, a 14 year old girl who was killed by George Harvey. Along with her two siblings, her parents were just minutes away from where their daughter was being killed, and had no idea of the horrifying things that were happening at the neighbor's house. Once finding out about their daughter's death, Mr. and Mrs. Salmon were devastated, and their lives, and the lives of their other children, would never be the same again.

I guess that you could say the children were the reason the parents were still together. They weren’t always the most affectionate kind of people, and their relationship was held together with the children. After the loss of their daughter, Mrs. Salmon was completely insane. She felt incapable of staying with the family, and left them with their father. Now, as a cause of Susie’s death, Mr. Salmon has complete responsibility over the children, which may not be best  thing ever, because Mr. Salmon is also going insane. With Mr. Harvey killing their daughter, both of the parents are not sure how to approach life anymore, and both of them have lost every bit of normalcy they ever had.

Susie’s murder didn’t only affect the life of her parents, her little sister was also very distraught from this tragic event. “If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?” is a quote from the book My Sister’s Keeper; however it seems to explain the relationship that Susie had with her sister. After Susie’s death, her sister pretends that there never was a Susie. She pretends that there was no time that her and her sister had together. For her, it is easier to cope this way, though she is truly just a disappointment to Susie. I can only imagine that the worst thing than being gone, is pretending that you were never there.

With all the lives affected by Mr. Harvey’s actions, I have to say that I think Susie’s younger brother got the hardest thing to deal with. He was only four when Susie died. He never really got anytime to live with his parents and sister when they weren’t depressed over Susie’s death. He will never have both of his parents in his life together, and he will never have any sanity from his parents at all. His older sister will never talk about life with Susie. Because of Susie passing away, the brother will never get a chance to live a normal life; he will always have to live with the changes from the murder.

Many lives were affected by a death in a book, but that doesn’t  mean it only happens in books. Recently, at my church, a little boy named Jackson passed away. He was two years old. Correction, he was one  year and 364 days old. On the morning of April 20, Jackson’s parents laid him down for a nap. His mother left to go to the store, to buy birthday presents for him, and his father stayed home with their five year old daughter, Kate. After sleeping all day, when the parents  went to wake him up, he wasn’t breathing. They called 911, but it was already too late. Their son was gone. 

Little Jackson should never have died, but he did. Even if he had to die, his mother shouldn’t have been the one to find him, unconscious, in his bed.  For the rest of her life, she will never be able to get the image out of her brain, her son laying there, dead. Though it has only been days since his passing, she has already slipped into depression, and can’t find answers to any of her questions. But she still has another kid, and she still needs to try to keep her composure. She has already lost a ton of weight and looks tired at all hours of the day. For the rest of her life, she will fear going to bed at night, or laying Kate down, because she will  remember how her son never woke up. Though she is breaking inside, she has to keep her cool for the sake of her family.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        It’s not fair to assume that the mother is the only one that will be upset, the dad will be too. The dreams he had about playing baseball with his son, or teaching him how to treat women right are all in the past now. For the rest of his life, I can imagine the father will feel as its partially his fault, for he did not check on Jackson earlier. I don’t believe there will be a day that will pass where he won’t blame himself for this horribly tragedy.

Not everybody in this planet is lucky enough to have a brother or sister. Not every kid is blessed with the opportunity to grow up with a best friend, but Kate was. Kate had her brother, Jackson. She had the pride that went along with being a big sister, too. Every time you saw her she had some story to tell about how she was a big sister. But now she isn’t a big sister anymore. She doesn’t have a brother.  Kate is only five years old, which means that from now on, she will always have this memory in the back of her mind. She will always remember that she once had her brother. Just in the past few days, she has already shown signs of not doing certain things, because when he was alive Jackson liked to do them. She doesn’t like to go to places alone, and she doesn’t like to go to bed.  Little Kate is only five, and has already dealt with something that most people never have to go through in their lives, and she will always be affected by it.

Every minute approximately 102 people die in the world. Along with those 102 people, we can safely say that many more lives than that get ruined by these deaths. Next time you hear or read about a death, I bet the main focus of the article will be about the person who died, how they lived such a wonderful life, and how it ended too soon. Not about the family and the friends left behind that are suffering without this person in their life. I’m not saying that we should completely forget the lost ones; I’m just saying we should remember the ones still here, the ones affected by the death.