Grief In Incredibly Close And When There's No Word Like G

Both Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by John Foer, and When There‘s no Word like Widow, by Kyleigh Leddy, are stories detailing a person‘s experience around grief. ELIC is about a 9-year-old child, Oskar, who lost his dad on 9/11. Oskar‘s weird personality leads him on a journey to try and find out the purpose of a key in his dad‘s closet. Throughout the story, we see how Oskar’s actions correlate to his grief such as hitting himself or spending lots of time in his father’s closet. WTNWLW is a personal narrative about Kyleigh and how her sister went missing and committed suicide. We see how Kyleigh copes with the situation by not acknowledging the death of her sister when someone asks about her siblings or her believing that her sister is still out there missing rather than dead. Both stories show

This is shown when he contemplated going inside his dad’s closet. “But I hadn't gone back in since he died, that was a year ago.”(later)“ I Held the doorknob before I turned it” (page 36) This is proof that Oskar felt restraint due to his father‘s death as he didn't bother going into his dad’s closet for a year. Oskar is usually very curious so not going into his dad’s closet for a year shows how his emotions became limited. Furthermore, a great example of Oskar’s emotions being limited is when he dug up his father’s coffin near the end of the story, “I was surprised again, although again I shouldn't have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn't there. In my brain I knew he wouldn't be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else.”(page 190). Oskar believing his dad was not in his coffin goes to show how he made up scenarios in his head rather than accept the reality. Oskar is a very logical person, being able to comprehend skills like math and science well, so only his emotions while grieving could have had this