Missing Mama Analysis

In the novel, her mother dies when she was going to visit her cousins in Idaho. Her mother does not drive herself to Idaho because she has a trouble with driving alone. As a result, she takes the bus and unfortunate things happen to her. The bus experiences a tremendous accident which causes her mother dies. At the same time, Sal remarks that “I prayed that we would not be in an accident (I was terrified of cars and buses) and that we would get there by my mother’s birthday-seven-days away and that we would bring her home” (Creech 7).

In paragraph 31, her mom asked her to make friends, but the daughter doesn’t see the point of it. She says she never has time for friends. She also tells mother that they have to move every few months so there's no point. Some more evidence is found in paragraph 24 when she doesn’t want to stay in New Mexico for the summer. The daughter feels like it's a world away from California.

Sal already knew her mom had died, but she didn’t want to believe it. She never let herself believe that her mom has passed away. Sal’s mom died when she was going to Lewiston, Idaho. She was in a bus, and the bus tipped over killing everyone except one person, and that person wasn't Sal’s mom. Sal loves her mom and doesn’t want to think she is dead.

I shore do miss those times, but we haven 't gone on many walks since then, because she 's been cross with me about overruling her vote to go to Oregon. Mi Ma has been trying to persuade me to leave Clementine here. She has been trying to persuade me to take the Cline family to Oregon ever since an old fella named Albert went there. I think she takes a liken to him ever since pee pa died from a gunfight in town. His death was only last year and she 's already after a new man.

She watched her mother suffered and vow to never suffer that way. While we were talking about death, I asked her how she felt about death. In this stage, she started to think more about death due to her parents dying. She appear to be a strong women but you can clearly see it affected her a lot more than she lead on to be. Her relationship with her husband was not stable but for the sake of the children, they did decide to stay in the relationship.

Her mother died during the car accident, leaving Sage the only one to survive. By continuing to attend the grief support group for three years shows how she is still stuck in the past. Nonetheless, after listening to the painful history her grandmother has gone through, it changed her way of viewing everything. Despite the pain endured when she was young, she lives a life in which she is proud of. This made Sage understand that the past should not be the reason to live by.

No one knew how she came to life. The only thing the towns people knew was that she existed and this begun the lineage to Johnathan. Brod later became the adopted daughter of Yankel D. Yankel’s love for Brod was immense. Yankel lost his wife because she decided to leave him. She left a note saying “I left you because I needed too.” Yankel lost the love of his wife, but Brod filled that void.

The significance of Kincaid’s title “The Estrangement” is to describe her deteriorating relationship with her mother. In the story, Kincaid explains how she stopped talking to her mother a few years before she died because she always made her feel like her accomplishments weren't good enough. Estrangement is the fact of no longer being on friendly terms or part of a social group and during the story Kincaid looked at her mother as a hero; but eventually developed resentment.For example, in the first sentence of the essay Kincaid said “ three years before my mother died, I decided not to speak to her again”. I think Kincaid’s essay does not have a thesis or claim; the entire story contradicts itself. In the beginning of the essay she talks

Flooding in the Trailer Park- 1972 One summer day Carol’s mother called to make sure she was okay. Carol had heard that Hurricane Agnes was approaching the area she lived in Pennsylvania but it was just a steady rain outside her window. An hour later the answer to her mother’s question would have been completely different. “I was worried about how deep the water was going to get and if I would have a home to return to after the hurricane had passed.” It was back in 1972, Carol Snyder was 23 and living in a trailer park with her husband, Richard. At the time, Hurricane Agnes passed through Stony Creek, Pennsylvania causing them to have to evacuate.

In the poem “forgiving my father”, Lucille Clifton writes of a young daughter reminiscing about her father’s recent death. The daughter talks about it being Friday, it being payday. She discusses her father and how he owed her and her dead mother money when really they just wanted him to be present. The daughter feels she has had no time with her father and she resents him for it. He was not present in her life and now he has passed away, leaving her with a yearning for something that she will never obtain.