In this past week’s reading of Parable of the Sower we learned that Lauren’s younger brother, Keith, dies in a gruesome manner and neither she nor their dad cries. Lauren says she’s never seen her dad cry, and perhaps because she looks up to him so much, she doesn’t cry either. Keith is her brother and she loves him as such but she never really likes him, and the fact that his death is not only eventual but expected, she feels less towards the loss. But the gril feels more connected with her dad, she respects him, looks up to him, and admires him as a leader, a father, and a person. So why doesn’t she cry when he disappears? At frist he’s only gone for a day or two and she has hope that he will come back home, but then he doesn’t and the community holds a funeral service, and not once does Lauren cry. Her step-mother Cory constantly cries over the loss of her son and husband, and the entire community mourns her father’s absence, so why doesn’t she feel the same? It seems odd that she should love a person so much and not be heartbroken by his disappearance. The whole issue is left resolved at the moment, and I believe we’ll gain informaiton on the subject later in the novel simply because it feels so unfinished. Perhaps this is how Lauren feels as well, and she doesn’t want to believe her father is truly gone, even though she pushes through he denial and tells herself “So he’s dead. That’s that.” But if this is true then she should be sad, and yet she continues to dream about leaving the community to head north and only views her father’s absence as a possible hinderance in her plans. I think Lauren’s hyperempathy has forced her to learn to not feel in certain situations so she can protect herself. This is a learned response and she can’t cry because it would leave her weakened.
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This post is interesting to me because of the implied judgments on what is the correct way to display grief. Our culture not only judges people with a surprising degree of harshness when it comes to expressing grief, but it’s incredibly inconsistent on what is an appropriate display. If a loved one has been murdered and you are hysterical, you are suspicious because you’re being dramatic. If you are shocked and silent, you are suspicious because you’re not crying. If you cry a little and then pull yourself together, you’ve gotten over it too quickly. If you can’t think about the person without breaking down into tears, you’re putting on a show.
Lauren deals with her grief internally, which shouldn’t be a surprise because she deals with everything internally — her hopes, her fears, her dreams, her faith, and yes, even her grief. The times that she has reached out and made herself vulnerable, like telling Joanne about her plans for disaster preparation, she is punished for it (61). She reached out to Amy, and Amy was killed (50-2). She has been conditioned to internalize everything about her life and self, and even her hero, her father, tells her “Don’t talk about this any more”(65). Is it a surprise that when she loses him that she doesn’t make a public show of grief?
I don’t think that Lauren’s lack of tears means that she isn’t mourning her father. I think that she *is* heartbroken, that she *does* feel just as strongly as Cory does. She just doesn’t show it in the same way.