In her article entitled “Cultural Aspects of Death and Dying”, Marcia Carteret states that “while the end of life experience is universal, the behaviors associated with expressing grief are very much culturally bound.” Dying is indeed the last event in all humans’ lives, whether it is by natural causes, suicide or murder. However, how family and friends deal with the loss of a lost one is deeply personal and cultural. For some, funerals are a way to celebrate the life of the deceased, for others it is the moment to say the last goodbyes. In this part, I will make a distinction between mourning and grieving based on the following definitions from the article “Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective” “grief is a subjective state, a …show more content…
After Ikemefuna, whom Nwoye was very fond of, was killed, Nwoye lives this inner experience “something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry. He just hung limp.” , which one can identify with Suzy’s when she says that “everything lost its color.” Suzy’s pain “She was looking to fill a certain longing, a certain desperation. Yet, by the time the food arrived, she no longer had any appetite.” is also similar to Okonkwo who “did not taste any food for two days after the death of Ikemefuna. He drank palm-wine from morning till night” . For them both, it is as if the world had stopped. They seem to be in denial and at the same time too aware of what happened. Those examples about mourning and grieving are very different, according to the book the readers choose to read. Those rituals, whether it is a burial, or having the ashes scattered in the ocean, are for everyone a way to go through the terrible hardship that losing a loved one is. In the end, it is important to note that none of these ways of mourning and grieving are comparable to one another, even though they can be similar, because it is such a subjective moment in one’s life, they are no superior or inferior ways of grieving and …show more content…
There are thousands of poems, songs and others books about it. That is what makes it universal, the fact that love is shared by all seven billions people on the planet. However, there are different ways to express love, and also different kinds of love. One can feel love towards a friend, a husband or wife, a parent, a son or a daughter. In this part, we will focus on love within a family, love between siblings and their parents, as well as between them. What is noticeable in both books is that with love, often comes a desire to protect the person who is loved. We have two great examples with Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and Grace in The Interpreter. Throughout The Interpreter, we see that Grace does her best to keep her sister away from her and her parents’ business. Suzy does not know what is going on between her parents and her sister, and she sees her sister’s actions as rejection, as if her sister did not love her. However, towards the end of the story, Suzy starts finding out about her parents’ behaviors against the Korean community and she understands that her sister has always been aware of what they have been doing. The only thing she wanted by keeping Suzy away was to protect her because she did not want her to have to carry the burden of their parents. That is a form of love. Okonkwo’s behavior is different, but it carries the same message. His family and his peers think that he is too