Close Reading

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time-the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part" (Irving 139).

When Tabby dies at the baseball game, both Owen and John are both quite saddened. John lost his mother, the one person who knows who his father is,  and Owen lost a person who truly understood him and cared for him. This part in the book is when John realizes the pieces of his mother that he misses and the things that he will soon miss, the places and parts that remind him of her. He realizes how things will gradually change, and he will slowly see things that are missing about his everyday life.

Losing someone is a very gradual process. You first lose the being of the person. The actual body that can communicate and that can be there at your side. Their actual presence is no longer there with you, and this is the first initial thing that happens. The rest of the process will happen at different times. It will occur when you try and call their phone and all you get is a voice mail or a disconnected line. It will occur when you can no longer can smell their scent off their clothes or the memories start to fade away. Your routine no longer includes them in it, and you do not think about them everyday. Losing someone comes in steps and each time, it can be overwhelming and filled with sadness, pain and suffering.

Each day, or every so often, the idea that the person is gone will pop into your mind because something triggers it. And then, something else will trigger it another time, until all of those trigger points disappear. The person then becomes a memory, something that you can think about. And then there is a grave or a place you can visit to remind yourself of the person.

For John, he has to decide where to live. He needs to find the place where he can feel comfortable without the constant reminders that the most important person in his childhood is gone. He needs to be able to come to a place where he can go somewhere that does not remind him every few minutes of the tragedy that occurred. And eventually that will happen. Even though he will never forget his mother, he will forget about some of the things that remind him of her or the scent of the clothes she used to wear. He might forget about the clothes she used to make or the sound of her voice. But, he will always have some memories, even if parts of her begin to fade.

This is a point in the novel where John has to learn to grow up and accept what life has thrown at him. He will need to learn to live without his mother. He has to make important decisions without her, such as where he is to live, where he wants to go to school, and how much he wants Dan in his life. He has to learn to get through the day without feeling overwhelmed, lost on his way. It will take courage and strength, but he will be able to do it, just as he will be able to handle each small missing part of his mother in his life.