Precis-Throughout the experience of the death of my brother, my family, my mother, my husband, and myself went through an array of emotions. Some taking it more heavy than others. My brother was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and the limited amount of help available kept most hope for a recovery as just hope. Most people in Antigua who do have AIDS would be able to tell you about the lack of help, so when he did die there wasn't as much of a feeling of grief. People knew this would happen, changing the way they felt about it. The relationship I had with my mother and my brother wasn't a normal relationship, for the most part I didn't like them. Me and my brother had an unusual relationship and when my brother died I didn't feel like i loved him. I only knew him for the first three years and the last three years of his life. After his death he looked nothing like he did before becoming sick. His skin changed, his lips and all body features seemed to be dead. My brother had died, my father, and my mentor which changed me but to them I would like to say thank you.
Quote-"And my brother died, for he kept dying; each time I remembered that he had died it was as if he had just at that moment died, and the whole experience of it would begin again; and my brother had died, and I didn't love him; or, at any rate, I didn't love him in the way that I had come to understand love" (Page 148)
"I expected Mr. Shawn to read, and so when I first heard of my brother dying and immediately knew I would write about him, I thought of Mr. Shawn, but Mr. Shawn had just died, too, and I had seen Mr. Shawn when he was dead, and even then I wanted to tell him what it was like when he had died" (Page 197)
"My mother's house after he was dead was empty of his smell, but I did not know that his dying had a smell until he was dead and no longer in the house, he was at the undertaker's, and I never asked my mother about the smell of the house." (Page 177)
'Not really more than a week after he was buried in the warm and yellow clay of the graveyard in Antigua, I resumed the life that his death had interrupted, the life with my own family, and the life of having written a book and persuading people to simply go out and buy it" (Page 152)
Thoughts- I feel like the end of this book goes against the idea that most people feel the way death is SUPPOSED to be. I feel like the word SUPPOSED is something that goes against the name of the class SUPPOSED would mean something is normal because thats how it should be. With the idea that NORMAL is WEIRD it makes me feel like this story fits perfectly with the idea of the class. Looking at other perspectives of things in life is what this book does. If your brother were to die people expect you to be grieving and upset, which is something that Jamaica Kincaid could have written about. However she admits that she only knew him for the beginning of his life and the end. There isn't much feeling that she has compared to NORMAL people because she has only known her brother a short amount of time. And because she references not loving him I feel like its an alternative to the way people feel how you HAVE to cry even when people don't know the person. If she loves her brother at a different way where she barely loves him according to what she knows love to be, theres a more accurate depiction of death delivered in the story.
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