For my reading of “Written on the body” by Jeanette Winterson, I wanted to focus on the idea of mourning a relationship in the same way you mourn a person. When the narrator reads about mourning as a way to grieve what could have been between them and Louise, I was reminded of a piece of advice I was given in middle school. I was told to mourn every ending relationship like a death to give yourself the closure when the rest of the world doesn’t want to give it to you. I was never really sure what that meant until my mom passed of appendix cancer, and I was left with a million questions I’d never get the answer to.
I was really connected with the part where the narrator finds one of Louise’s hairs on a coat and mentions that nobody really tells you how to deal with finding a small piece of a lost loved one. I remembered my first time finding my mom’s hair on a sweater of hers I was wearing, and how that affected me very similarly to the narrator, so it was really nice to see that represented. A lot of stories about cancer don’t really follow the bereaved, so it was really nice to see these parts being represented in media this way.
Leave a Reply