The Meaning of Never

Being a typical middle class NYC teenager; both adventurous, always yearning and desiring to see and know and feel more, while still fairly sheltered and inexperienced, I am thankful to admit that I do not know the meaning of never. I have not felt never, I have not seen never. While it is true that I'm already too old to ever be a professional dancer, ice skater, horse-back-rider, or gymnast (which I still find sad, though I never considered any of them as a career choice), I am constantly told that I can do, be, think, see, have whatever, whoever I so desire. My entire life is ahead of me. And though there are occasional breakdowns over fear of missed opportunities, virtually nothing in my life is a definitive never. I am only able to imagine the life of my great aunt who will never regain her vision, or the little boy from my church who stood and talked about his 9 year old sister he lost to lukemia. He will never see her again. I try to imagine the pain inside of my father's friend who once made his livelihood through his greatest passion; piano, until a terrible accident crippling his hands, but I cannot. He will never play again. That would be, for me, to never act again, never write again. I cannot fathom. And though I do feel guilty for my inability to ever fully empathize with any of them, share some of the hurt, I'm so thankful and lucky to know that, as The Elegance of the Hedgehog taught me, I don't feel what they feel, carry the burden that they do; I am safe, privileged, blessed. I do not know the meaning of never.

It was initially proving to be quite difficult writing a blog post as I usually do, using a single quote or theme, with this book seeing as though almost every other chapter is titled "Profound thought #__", and practically the entire book is thought-provoking and eloquent. I found myself, at times, underlining so much it was ridiculous, and beginning to worry about how I would manage to pull off this entry, practically deciding to simply not write anything at all and to just move on to my next book. In the last five or so pages, however, a single idea hit me harder than anything else had. It was said by Paloma Josse, a bright 12 year old from a wealthy family who comes the the conclusion that life is vain and useless, planning to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday. Upon coping with the sudden death of Renee, the concierge of her building whom she had only just begun to grow exceedingly close with, Paloma realises that her own plan was vain in and of itself, and that she did not truly comprehend what it would mean to die, to experience never; "For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word never. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again.' Ultimately you always have the illusion that you're in control of what's happening; nothing seems definitive" (page 324).

Technically speaking I am, in ways, quite similar to Paloma; young, privileged, naive and unaware of things that I am so sure I know, dramatic, and quick to draw grand conclusions, plan great events without looking so clearly at the larger picture or the actual implications of what those things may mean, may result in. This is what angsty teenagers do; even the talented and intellectual ones like Paloma, even the startling normal ones like myself. It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment that one grows up or comes of age, and it is most always a series of moments or events that individually shape what the adult you will be, but this, I think, is part of it. To know, realise, fully comprehend the meaning of never. To understand that 'never say never' is a rule often hard to follow, that there are things that happen, that exist, which, by their very definition require never. To see an ultimate and definite end to something, to feel true regret; it's what separates the children from the adults, the free from the burdened. And though I think I'm a marginally more self-aware, I'm still lucky to be able to say that by the end of this book, by the end of this entry, while I have my shallow never's of lost chances that really don't matter and melodramatic exaggerations of what never is, I am still free.

This book hurts.

I don't know why I never read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak- I'd certainly heard a lot about it. Maybe it was my being guilty of judging the book by its cover that wasn't exactly suggesting "my type" of book or maybe it was the specific people that had recommended it to me whose opinion I didn't trust or value or believe that I'd agree with or the concept of death as a narrator I'd heard about that implied an ironic black humor sort of book- definitely not my taste. But then with about a month left before starting high school, I had the novel idea of going online to check for any summer assignments that should have been already completed. And lo and behold, I was supposed to have read The Book Theif. At first, this was a burden seeing as though I wasn't keen on the idea of the book in the first place and being long, it rather interupted my other nerdy reading plans for the last few weeks of summer. However, though I expected to have to force myself to pick it up and read in order to ever finish, it turned out that I rather had to to force myself to put it down for a a 20-minute meal break every once in a while. I devoured the book, often reading a few hundred pages in one sitting. This may have had something to do with the fact that, while reading it, I had two nine hour flights between Alaska and New York on which I couldn't fall asleep and only read/wrote for hours on end. But whatever the reason, those 552 pages flew by far faster than I ever could have imagined.

Set in Germany during the 1940's, you know that this book hurts without me even having to even say it. It revolves around Liesel Meminger- a young German girl- and her learning about, then shortly after falling in love with words, books, writing. She is a girl who goes through more in ten years than anyone should have to endure in a lifetime. Her story is narrated by death- a character who helps you see into people in a way that no one else could. He, while collecting souls of the dead throughout the world in a time when there seems to be more to collect than ever before, follows Liesel through her childhood, often revealing what will happen or who he will visit next, long before it takes place in the story. The language is beautiful, every moment is poetic, and each image is strong.

So I have forewarned you- this book hurts. It hurts simply because of its setting and its protagonists struggles. It hurts because death is the narrator who tells you what will happen before it does which makes a different kind of pain. It is no longer a quick shock that stabs your heart. No, it's suddenly slow and excruciating. It is waiting for what you know is coming, watching around every corner of every page for it to come. It is standing by and knowing what the characters you love don't, it is wanting to tell them and not being able to, wishing to scoop them up out of the story and save them, but you can't. Like things so often are, though, what makes this hurt the most is also why it's so beautiful- the characters and how you are able to see into them. Because this isn't an ordinary book with 2-dimensional, rather undefined supporting characters. There is so much depth, not only in Liesel, but in her mama who curses like no ones business and her papa who plays the accordian better than anyone ever could and in the young jewish man that they hide in their basement who lives to hear her weather reports and her friend Rudy who wants to be Jesse Owens and in the mayor's wife and the angry woman next door who spits on her door step. There is depth even in the boy that they steal apples with and a kid from school named Tommy and the stern nazi who owns the candy store. Every single character is endearing and good somewhere, every single characters finds a little crack in your heart to wedge themselves into. Even death. And that hurts so much, somehow, because when you find yourself loving so much, you suddenly have worlds more to loose, immense amounts of more potential pain to be caused.

This post has done the book no justice and barely began to organize or complete my thoughts on it, but I don't think that I'll ever really be able to do that. It is one of the most endearing, original, haunting, and heartbreaking books that I have ever read. I cannot find words for it.

Oskar Schell Would Be Eighteen Now

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

And I'm not really sure what to think about that.

Last night as I slipped into bed, I heard my mom exclaim the news and run downstairs to watch coverage with my dad. But I was tired and there was school the next day and I don't think that it fully sunk in exactly what his being gone for good really meant. I just wanted to go to bed.

Then today, it was all the buzz in social studies class as people relayed their different versions of what they heard had happened so much to the point that I barely even believed it was true anymore. And when I got home from school and sat down to the computer and saw the headlines on Firefox's homepage and on the cover of The NY Times and rolling across the bottom of our television screen, I realized how fast everything was happening- so much so that I barely had a moment to think about all of it. I knew that I should be thrilled and excited and in the mindset that justice has been served to someone who deserved it more than anyone else in the world. But, as last nights coverage of the thousands of people who went down to ground zero at the earliest hours of the morning to chant "USA" and the national anthem and celebrate the extermination of Bin Laden like it was new years eve, I couldn't help but think how barbaric it was. I know that I should have found the video to be heart-warming and inspirational as I looked into the joyful faces of people who had been so personally scarred by his attack on The World Trade Center. But when I saw their streamers and horns and raised fists and American flags, it seemed like the saddest thing in the world for our country to be celebrating the death of this person as much as we are. Even after what he did, even after who he hurt, how many he hurt, and the cruel ways in which he hurt them.

He was still a person.

Right?

And then I couldn't help but think about how if I- as someone was barely at all personally affected by 9/11 and is likewise not personally harmed or could benefit from Bin Laden's death- was so shaken up and confused by all of this, then how would someone like, say, Oskar Schell react?

Oskar would be 18 now.

Oskar Schell- an adult.

What an impossible thought that is.

Would he be the same? Confused and searching for answers like he was 10 years ago? Would he think the same as me-- that it was wrong to have killed someone no matter who they were?

Or, the more likely of the two, the obvious answer, the response that is only in his natural human nature to have, the thing that makes me almost agree with Bin Laden's killing-

Would he be at Ground Zero- chanting and shouting and grinning at the fact that his dads killer had finally gotten what he deserved?

8 year old Oskar Schell.

So confused.

So scared.

Searching for something to make sense.

To fit in.

To justify it all

Would he be one of those people? Those people whose faces I thought to be barbaric? Is that who they all were-- just "Oskar Schell"s? Angry parents and sons and daughters and husbands and wifes and sisters and brothers and friends who were so hurt and broken- who were changed for good because of what Bin Laden did, whose once happy, carefree 8 year old smiles had been turned into the stone cold face of an angry adult who rejoiced in the killing of another human being?

I can't bear the thought of Oskar Schell being the face that represents all of those people, but I know that- were he real- it would most likely be the side he took. Because it's easy for someone like me who is shielded and unharmed from these horrors to say that killing is bad. But, in reality, how does someone who's childhood was stolen from them ever forgive the person who took it and their father away?

The ending of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, being one of the saddest endings of any book I've ever read, tied up no loose ends. It just further expressed Oskar's vulnerability and anger and confusion about every heartbreaking thing that happened to him in a powerful and affecting way. It showed that he never healed.

We would have been safe

It showed that maybe he, like so many other victims of this tragedy, never would heal.

It confirmed and supported that Oskar would not forgive and forget- he, instead, would be rejoicing over the death of the man who took that precious safe feeling and reality away from him

As I look into the faces of the people who celebrated at Ground Zero last night, I have to try to imagine seeing Oskar Schell and think to myself "would I maybe support them if he was there?". Because, essentially, they are all people just like Oskar Schell, for all I know. Their story is reminiscent of his own. They are people who have reason to be there, even if I don't agree with it. I have to try to see it all from their point of view.

But even then, does standing and celebrating in the spot where it all began really end it? Will killing Bin Laden give anyone closure? Will rejoicing over it ease anyone's pain? And, I don't know the answer to any of that because I've never experienced it before, but in my humble opinion, it really won't. Still, I think it's impossible for someone to go through that and come out in that positive mindset. I can go and preach about this all I want, but the truth is that if I was in their situation, I'd probably do the same, think the same, act the same. Wouldn't I?

How We Deal With Grief

The last few weeks of my reading life have been an absolute dream as I started and finished two of my now favorite books of all time- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. My month has been a marathon of beautiful writing. Although these two books are very different from one another in terms of genre, character-type and writing style, they do share one common and dominant theme- grief. Oskar experiences grief when his father is killed in 9/11, and Joan when her husband of 40 years dies of heart failure.

What struck me so immediately about the character of Oskar Schell was his matter-of-fact attitude and way about everything. Even his fathers death. And watching a nine year old boy not only lose his dad, but address it in the same way that he would address the weather report was almost more painful than if he had sobbed nonstop throughout the story. Because that was his way of dealing with grief- keeping it inside, not dealing with it. Oskar makes sure that everything is clean and tidy on the outside for people to see by not letting out the messy inside thoughts and words and actions and feelings which, I know from experience, is so much more painful. And you have to think about it- was Oskar making this concious decision? Was he choosing to keep it in for the sake of, say, his mom or grandma? No- he's nine years old, his dad just died- he doesn't know what to do or think or who to turn to. He's polite and smart and just not the kind of person who can lash out or break down or show people what he's really going through. He doesn't keep his father's last voicemail's a secret to spare his mother any more pain, he does it because he's terrified and confused and guilty. Because so much responsibility and so much agony has been placed on his tiny shoulders and he's only nine and the only way he knows to deal with grief is what automatically happens- and that's nothing. Because nothing happens if we don't make it happen, and Oskar, not knowing what to make happen, does nothing.

And so it stays inside.

And that's how he deals with grief.

And he's only nine.

And that breaks my heart.

Then there's Joan Didion, whose story is equally heartbreaking in a completely different way. Before I read this book, my theory was that grief was easier as you got older, as you came to expect and anticipate the deaths of friends and spouses who were, like you, nearing the ends of their lives. But this isn't true at all because as Joan says, when you're so in love, you don't see yourself as growing older,

"For Forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger".

She had spent two thirds of her life with this man, and just because he had to die, didn't make him actually dying any easier. When you come to depend on someone for everything, when you come to realize them as a literal part of you, when not a single day goes by that you don't see this person, talk to this person, touch this person, hug this person in 40 years, how big is the hole they leave behind? And how impossible is it to fill?

But what stands out the most, to me, about her book is that it's a book. That she relived and re-experienced every moment of this event and every feeling that followed for years to make this book. That she published it, releasing to the world her innermost thoughts in the most raw, personal, heartbreaking and beautiful way possible. That this is her way of dealing with grief- the only way she knows- writing.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden, to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind"

"Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

"Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant"

-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

And Joan Didion is so right.

Because no one expects death or grief- not how it really turns out to be, at least. And no one knows how to handle it when it does come.

Not even the seemingly most clever and scholarly nine year old boy that ever lived.

Not even the 70 year old woman who's intelligent and experienced and put together.

No one.

Because our minds use logic to make an image of what we think something will be like or feel like or look like, and there is nothing logical about grief. Because as much as we may plan or organize or try to control how our lives will play out, what happens happens. And when faced with crisis, it's hard to stick to your plans.

Molly Weasley And The Power Of Love *SPOILER ALERT*

Molly Weasley is not perfect. She is not rich or beautiful or flawless. But, she's strong- she's a fighter, and she's smart, and loving, and the most amazing mother that anyone could ever wish for. Mrs. Weasley lives for her kids. She doesn't love anything in the whole world as much as she does those six boys and one girl.

She's not the kind of mother who give their children whatever their hearts desire- even if she could. She pushes them, and disciplines them, and teaches them. She's not the kind of mother that kids dream about, hope for. The kind that let their children do whatever, the kind that leave them alone, let them go their own way, whether good or bad. The kind that let them have what they want, watch them make their mistakes and let them. The kind that can't be bothered- the kind that kids think they desire. She cares too much to be that type of mother.

She's the human kind- the kind that makes mistakes, the kind that knows what is best even if it seems like "the meanest thing in the world". The kind that's not afraid to be the bad guy once in a while if she knows that it will help her kid. The kind whose children complain about her endlessly- the real kind.

The realistic nature of this character is what makes everyone love her so much-- she's the mother that we all have or know or have met in our lives. And before the seventh book, that's all she was- just that motherly character. But, J.K. Rowling made an extremely intentional and strong choice that most people overlooked. The one and only curse word actually written in the entire Harry Potter series is said by Mrs.Weasley and it's said in defense of her child. After Fred is killed, all bets are off- her child is dead- she won't be calm anymore, she won't just watch as Bellatrix attacks her only daughter. I cannot help but wonder- is it love or hate that helps her kill Bellatrix? Because she is a powerful witch but, let's face it- Bellatrix is more powerful. So how does she kill her?

My first thought was hate. Is it hate so strong that builds up so much to her limit that it bursts through in a surge of power, of energy, of a sudden passion for what she's fighting for? Or is it the power of love? Does love, the same way that it helped Lily Potter, help Mrs.Weasley kill the cruel woman that poses as a threat to her family? Did love, something that Bellatrix most likely does not possess, defeat her?

The whole idea of Lily's love protecting Harry always seemed a little far fetched to me. It just didn't seem like something powerful enough but now, all of the sudden, when Mrs.Weasley put herself out there to save her daughter, it all made sense. Her love for Ginny and Fred was shining through. In this one split second of complete chaos and utter loathing, everything fit into place for me. And suddenly, I believed that Lily's love could protect Harry like it did.

Because, Molly Weasley showed me how strongly and fiercely a mother could love their child.

Silly how things end, isn't it?

SPOILER ALERT!!!! IF YOU HAVE NOT READ HARRY POTTER AND THE

DEATHLY HALLOWS, STOP READING HERE.

But seriously, what earth are you waiting for????

When I read over the scene of Hedwig's death I cannot help but be dissapointed by it's length and lack of intensity. The first time I read it, I felt so overwhelmingly confused and guilty. Why wasn't I crying? What the hell was the matter with me? This was Hedwig- Hedwig who just died and I was just sitting there. When Sirius died I couldn't contain myslef- my mom thought I was having some sort of attack, locked up in my bedroom. I cried when Cedric Diggory got killed and I cried when Hagrid's hippogriff nearly got killed, and god knows that Hedwig is far more important than Hagrid's Hippogriff. The last 100 pages of the Half Blood Prince is destroyed from my tears. So why couldn't I cry when Hedwig died? Her death was certainly important enough- that wasn't the issue. Was it simply that the way she died wasn't important enough? Sure, she can't talk so, it can't be dramatic in that respect- last words and all. But, somehow I feel like it should be more than just:

"No - HEDWIG"

A second's relief, and then another burst of green light. The owl screeched and fell to the floor of the cage.

"No - NO!"

"Hedwig - Hedwig -"

But the owl lay motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of her cage. He could not take it in, and his terror for the others was paramount.

And that's it- she's dead.

Hedwig who has been with Harry always- through thick and thin.

Hedwig who was with Harry wherever he went- who stayed with him at Howarts and who left with him in the summers.

Hedwig- who served as his only connection to the world in which he belonged during those long months spent with the Dursleys.

Hedwig who was given to him by Hagrid days before beginning at Hogwarts for the very first time when he was 11 years old. And now, 6 years later, only 53 pages into the 7th and final book, she's dead. And, no more than a half a page was dedicated to this tragic event.

Now, you may say that I'm overreacting- she's just an owl, right? Not even a major character. Not nearly as important as Sirius or Dumbledore or Ron or Hermione or Lupin or even Ginny. She doesn't deserve so much attention. But that's not true- if I've learned anything at all about what Dumbledore or Ron or Hermione or Sirius or Lupin thought was right, it's that all creatures are equal- all types of living things should be treated with the same respect and, going by that rule, Hedwig is possibly Harry's very best friend in the world, right?

So why does she get this pathetic ending? It's as if she almost fades away without anyone even noticing, anyone even caring. Had someone skipped a paragraph of reading, they never would have even known she died. They would have assumed that she was just mentioned less or left behind on their grand adventure or killed so unimportantly that J.K. Rowling didn't even bother to mention it. I don't think that Hedwig deserves that, do you?