HW 23 - Illness & Dying Book, Part 2

(Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997)

Precis:
Everyone dies, even the people that we can bear to be seperated from. There is no point in being depressed about someone's death because there is always someone else who had died before that person, and someone who will soon die. Death is a touchy subject but it needs to be discussed because people never mention the fact that when we die we may go to heaven, or hell but it all depends on what you believe. Everyone is going to die one day.

1. "...I did not love my brother, I did not like my brother, I was only so sorry that he had died.. (Pg. 106).

Jamaica wanted her brother to die because she felt like he didn't learn anything from this experience.

2. "I did not feel strong, I felt anger, my anger was everything to me, and in my anger lay many things, mostly made up of feelings I could not understand, feelings I might not ever understand, feeelings that everyone who knows me understands with an understanding that I will never know, or that someone who has never met me at all would understand as if they had made up my feelings themselves" (Pg. 108-109).

This sentence reminds me of Jamaica perfectly because throughout the whole book I could never understand her true feelings. She came back to Antigua because of her brother's death and in the process she began to develop a relationship with many people she had given up on from the day she left Antigua.

3. "...these are my thought on his dying and on his life- and that is one of the reasons to outlive all the people who can have anything to say about you, not letting them have the last word) that I understood him again.." (Pg. 111).

Jamaica is saying that the only way to live your life meaningfully is to prove those people wrong that doubted you and show that you are worth more than they imagine.

This book is very interesting because I can never really understand the true meaning behind Jamaica. Sometimes it seems that she wants to improve the relationship with her mother or brothers but other times she just accepts the fact that nothing is going to change. The point of her leaving Antigua was to find another life, a better one, in the States. I do believe that she has found a better life but sometimes I don't understand why can't she treat her mom or brothers the same way she treats her husband and children. I do understand that death has a big impact on your life whether you want it to or not but I am still confused about the impact Devon's death had on her.