GUYS IM HAVING A MOMENT!

Today, like all other days, we had another awesome discussion in our lit circle. My main moment today was when we were talking about the characters and how they are all emotionally, well we couldn't decide on a word but, distraught, incapacitated, disabled, etc. While talking about this I mentioned that these characters, mom Oskar, grandma, and grandpa, all have one thing in common: they all lost someone they really loved. For Oskar it was his dad, the one person on the planet who really understood him. For Oskar's mom it was her husband, for obvious reasons. For the grandparents it was Anna. For the grandma she was so close with her sister in so many ways and losing her was tragic. The grandpa was in love with her so losing her was obviously very painful for him as well. Their relationship blooms off their mutual love for Anna and trying to salvage what they have left of her. These people all lost someone of great importance to them. And now they have trouble sharing and expressing their emotions because they feel that if they do that then they will become close to whoever they are sharing with and if they come close to that person then the pattern will continue and they will lose that person in some way. We also talked about the long term effects these attacks must have had on this boy. I said that I would be afraid to go into tall buildings and petrified to go into airplanes if I was him. The other thing is that now he notices what things, like ferries, would be good potential attack targets which isn't something a younger boy should be thinking about. This does make him mature but it also raises concerns for his future. He is already bruising himself and we discussed that as he gets older we hope that doesn't further evolve into cutting and eventually suicide because he is 10 and already thinks of time as just slowly getting closer to death. It was kind of a sad discussion today. =(