Professor Moss
English 1500
11/20/12
Draft 2 Learning to Cope Just about everyone has lost that one person that they really care about and they know that everything can change at the drop of a hat. Death is an unexpected occurrence that could sometimes have long lasting mental and physical effects on people. In the play Down the Aisle by Patricia Leigh Gaborik a young girl Katie and her family are learning to cope with the death of their loved one. People handle the death of a loved one in different ways, and Katie tries to handle the death of her father by holding on to all the good memories she had of him. Not only is Katie deeply affected by their lost but the rest of her family is learning to cope with their lost by taking on different roles when he pasts. The father is a symbolic character in this play because he is the rock of their family, because he is strong and dependable. Each character in the play experiences different conflicts and changes in their relationship after losing the person they all loved the most. One conflict experienced in the play is the relationship between Katie and her mother before and after the death of Katie’s father. Katie and her mother don’t have the best relationship and at times it seems that Katie wishes that she would’ve been in the car accident with her father. This is a conflict because it seems as if Katie may blame her mother for the death of her father for making him go out while she stayed at home and took care of Katie. This causes a lot of tension between Katie and her mother because she also feels as though the death of her father might also be her fault. At the end of the play Katie and her mother appear to be closer to each other and her mother even apologizes for the things she’s done in the past and talks about Katie’s father. This is important because after years of not really speaking about him it shows that their mother is just starting to cope with his death. Her mother states