The Management of Grief

“You look at the audience, and at the preacher in his blue robe with his beautiful white hair, the potted palm trees under a blue sky, and you know they care about nothing.”

This quote, about a white preacher on television during the immediate aftermath of the plane crash, shows the distance that the narrator feels from her adopted country. It also shows the anger and bitterness that she feels about this distance, feelings that are expressed with a typical combination of quietness and bluntness. 

“I was so well brought up I never felt comfortable calling my husband by his first name.”

This quote shows the strictness and formality (to a Western sensibility) of the narrator’s culture and upbringing; it also calls into question Western ideas about intimacy and expressiveness. For the narrator, love is too serious and important of a concept to talk about freely; this does not mean that she does not love her husband.  

“‘I have no experience,’ she admits. ‘That is, I have an MSW and I’ve worked in liaison with accident victims, but I mean I have no experience with a tragedy of this scale—.’ ‘Who could?’ I ask.”

This exchange between the narrator and Judith Templeton represents the lack of understanding between them; while they are both speaking in English, they are nevertheless speaking in two different languages. Templeton is approaching the plane crash from a practical, bureaucratic perspective; the narrator’s perspective is more empathic. Each woman believes that she is the reasonable one, and there is a sense in which they are both right.