…Divorced, beheaded, survived

Losing someone you love is always tough, whether the person is on their deathbed affected by illness, dies a sudden death in an accident or of natural courses; it can truly turn one’s life upside down. To begin with many of us can feel a kind of relief, when our beloved relatives or friends finds peace and freedom from their torment, but then comes insomnia, anxiety, fatigue and overwhelming jumble of emotions you cannot prepare for. The pain and emptiness can leave you without any joy in life. But no matter how hard and impossible it may seem, you must accept and move forward. In the short story ‘’…Divorced, Beheaded, Survived’’ by Robin Black, the protagonist Sarah is trapped after the terrible loss of her brother Terry. We are witnessing her struggle between the acceptance of life and death, and how she throughout the story comprehends life and death.

The story takes place in two locations Manhattan and Massachusetts. Both of them are only described with few words. In Massachusetts Sara’s house and especially backyard is central for the story, the garden brings back many memories from her childhood. Sara is strongly connected to the garden and she feels sorry for her own kids, that they do not have the same childhood-home as she had. Instead of focusing on the setting, the story tells Sara’s ups and downs, during both present and past time. The structure in the story supports the emotional aspects in Sara life. The story is chronologically told, but uses flashbacks to tell about the protagonists’ childhood. These flashbacks reveal how much influence her past has on her present life, and that she is having a hard time letting the memory of her living brother go. The flashbacks indicate how much she really misses her brother, and that it still plays a huge role in her life even 30 years after he died. An example of how she lets her past influence her present could be “Mark and Coco are four years apart we had been two apart, Terry and I. And maybe it was superstition that made me wait that extra stretch of time before getting pregnant again” .

The structure itself is not only a way of elucidate the emotions of Sara, it is also symbol. The author uses the many flashbacks to show the reader the importance of her childhood. Sarah looks back to the happiest time of her life in a bittersweet remembrance. The time where she would act Henry VIII and his six wives in her own garden with her brother Terry and other children from around the area. Sara is strongly connected to this time in her life, and when the story tells us about her time in the garden, it’s written in a positive and in some way childish narrative form. This also shows that she feels so connected to the time, that even the feeling she had when was picked to play Anne Boleyn still comes to her memory. An example of the childish narrative form could be “It was almost worth giving up the role yourself just to watch Terry give it his all. And it might have been if it weren’t for the execution scene. But the beheading was just to good not to fight over. ” The title …Divorced, beheaded, Survived is also central for the story, and it originates from the rhyme ““Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” used to remember the fates of Henry VIII’s wives. The symbolic meaning is that the memory of the dead lives on, even a tragically death will leave memories and will not be forgotten, which Sarah in some way thinks, “it isn’t only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it´s the fact of utter disappearance after death” . The wives exemplify that memories can live for decades, if you keep them in your mind. The title also symbolizes Terry’s death. Sarah and Terry were separated through Terry’s terrible death. But not everything died with him the strong memory remained.

As earlier mentioned Sara is the story’s protagonist. She is a first person narrator, and therefore it is her point of view the plot is told from. We are told that she grew up in Massachusetts with her two-year older brother Terry and her Mom and Dad. Sara thinks of her childhood in their garden playing and acting the story of Henry VIII a lot, because it is her happiest memory of her brother. The turning point in Sara’s life is her brother’s death, from that day everything changed. She is having a hard time accepting his death, which often means she gets stuck in the past. This is seen when she thinks twice about getting pregnant because she want the age difference to be different than her and her brother’s. By doing so she hopes they will not become so attached to each other, and therefore not be in such a big grief and pain as she was if one of them suddenly passed away.

His death is a taboo in the family, and she does everything to avoid the subject. An example of this from the text is ‘’More than a decade ago, as soon as I thought Mark was old enough to ask me questions, I made the decision to put away the picture of my brother…’’ this symbolizes her fear of accepting her brother’s death. Sara realizes that she cannot keep living in denial, this happens when she sees her sons reaction, when she tells him his friend has passed away. She accepts her past and the death of her brother, and she decides to show and tell her son about Terry. Earlier in the story she was afraid of showing her real feelings, but in the end she accepts that death is a tough thing to move on from and that it takes time to heal wounds. She realizes that if the memory of Terry can survive death, she can too and this realization is the beginning of her finding inner peace and moving on. ‘’There are things that go on, I believe, important things that make only an intuitive kind of sense…Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’’