Personal Commentary on The Lovely Bones Essay

There always seems to be something extremely upsetting when we hear about the murder of a child. When we hear about tragedies of this nature through news or television shows, one can only imagine the pain and grief the family is going through. No matter how heartbreaking we find the situation we hear about to be, we know that our grief is just a small fraction compared to the grief the entire family and those closet to the deceased child are feeling.

The Lovely Bones which written by Alice Sebold is about a young girl called Susie Salmon who was raped and murdered by a neighbor. From Heaven, the girl watches her family and friends search for her body and murderer, and deal with the grief of Susie's loss in their own ways. Susie watches her family from heaven. She sees how they all cope with her disappearance, and deal with the fact that she was murdered and never coming back. She tries to give her family the power to move on, and help them get back to normal. Things dont work out the way she wants it to. Susie watches her family and friends fall apart in her heaven. The family grieves in their own separate ways. After few years, they finally get over this hardship and stick together.

Death is what we will have to face sooner or later. It is never easy to get over it. Especially, when death became the gap between us and someone we love. The memory of us would hunt for weeks, months, or even years. Someone said that time will heal, but the influence of the family member is somehow the most important thing. The road is never too long when someone you love is around you. In the heart-touching story The Lovely Bones we can see that the characters coping the changes in different ways and trying to make the right choice in order to get through the shadow. For example, Susies mother Abigail who loved Susie so much that she could hardly get rid of the sorrow of Susies death. She even considered her love to Susie would destroy her. So she tried to forget. She betrayed her husband pretending she was single. She left her husband and two young children trying to get away from the tragedy of her daughter. It took her so many years to realize that her love to Susie would not destroy her and the family she left behind would not walk through the shadow unless she came back home. The freedom she used to have would not heal her sorrow. It was her family which was the only cure.

In the last part of this novel, Susie had said that: As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became born aloft away from it. These were lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections sometimes tenuous sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life. But I think that even though Susies family has gone through the shadow of her death, they would never forget Susie. She will live in their mind, sharing their happiness and sadness. Their world will affiliate with compact bones which come from their close-knit hearts. I also think that the author must have forgiven and appreciated from her past, we could realize it from the last part of the story. Lovely bones not only represent beautiful transmutability after overcoming sadness, but also represent forgiveness and redemption.

In conclusion, The Lovely Bones teaches me a lot. I understand that death is one of the things in life people don't want to face. However, it is not known as despair or hopeless, someone does learn something from the death. Death is another beginning. It makes people growing. It is undoubtedly hard to get rid of the sorrow of the fact that it is impossible to meet the person you lost again. However, when the time you are able to face it on your own, it is the time you have learned and grown and walked through the shadow.