Summary Strong Response Essay
Jessie Morschauser
Professor Hallstrom
English 100
September 9, 2014
981 words
Summary/Strong Response Essay Losing someone close to you can feel like losing a part of yourself. A piece of you goes missing. Imagine living your life with them there and then having them ripped away from you. It really is as horrible as it sounds. In “The Unmothered” Ruth Margalit explains her experience of losing her mother to cancer. She tells about what it’s like on certain days of the year such as, her mother’s birthday, the day her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and her parent’s anniversary. She also gives some memories she has of her mother and what her mother taught her. I, like Ruth, also lost my mom to cancer so I was really able to connect with this article. I also dread certain days of the year but unlike the author I see my mother’s death in a very different way. “The Unmothered” by Ruth Margalit was an article written in The New Yorker about what it was like losing her mother. Margalit’s mother was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer after thinking she had a cough and a “pulled” muscle in her leg. After her mother’s diagnosis she began to think somewhat selfishly, “The truth is, I was thinking, selfishly, about myself. That my mother would never see me marry. That she would not know my children. That the following summer I would turn twenty-eight -her lucky number- and she might not be there” (Margalit). According to Margalit, she believes that she experienced both anticipatory grief, mourning before death, and delayed grief, a postponed reaction to the death. She explains that the day her mother was diagnosed she grieved. Right after Margalit began graduate school at Columbia she received a call from her sister saying that her mother was getting sick very quickly, she knew she needed to get home as fast as she could. Margalit later was thinking about her grieving process and realized that she didn’t experience delayed grief but rather that “grief keeps odd hours,
Professor Hallstrom
English 100
September 9, 2014
981 words
Summary/Strong Response Essay Losing someone close to you can feel like losing a part of yourself. A piece of you goes missing. Imagine living your life with them there and then having them ripped away from you. It really is as horrible as it sounds. In “The Unmothered” Ruth Margalit explains her experience of losing her mother to cancer. She tells about what it’s like on certain days of the year such as, her mother’s birthday, the day her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and her parent’s anniversary. She also gives some memories she has of her mother and what her mother taught her. I, like Ruth, also lost my mom to cancer so I was really able to connect with this article. I also dread certain days of the year but unlike the author I see my mother’s death in a very different way. “The Unmothered” by Ruth Margalit was an article written in The New Yorker about what it was like losing her mother. Margalit’s mother was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer after thinking she had a cough and a “pulled” muscle in her leg. After her mother’s diagnosis she began to think somewhat selfishly, “The truth is, I was thinking, selfishly, about myself. That my mother would never see me marry. That she would not know my children. That the following summer I would turn twenty-eight -her lucky number- and she might not be there” (Margalit). According to Margalit, she believes that she experienced both anticipatory grief, mourning before death, and delayed grief, a postponed reaction to the death. She explains that the day her mother was diagnosed she grieved. Right after Margalit began graduate school at Columbia she received a call from her sister saying that her mother was getting sick very quickly, she knew she needed to get home as fast as she could. Margalit later was thinking about her grieving process and realized that she didn’t experience delayed grief but rather that “grief keeps odd hours,
Cited: Margalit, Ruth. "The Unmothered." The New Yorker. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Oct. 2014.