In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie shows how grief can affect an individual by taking away their happiness or causing them to lose hope.
Junior’s grandma’s death was one of the first events causing people’s happiness to fade and causing them to lose hope. When Junior’s grandmother dies his mother is affected by it because she had lost someone she loved who had been there her entire life, “At the hospital, my mother wept and wailed. She’d lost her mother. When anybody, no matter what how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents” (Alexie 157). Grief took away