Denial Responses In On Grief And Grieving

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler are the authors of On Death and Dying, their book, On Grief and Grieving, portrays several responses to the loss of the loved one that can be related to Alice Munro’s story, Silence, and how her character, Juliet, faces the disappearances of the most important people in her life. In On Grief and Grieving, Kubler-Ross and Kessler claim that facing the loss of the loved, people widely express the responses as denial, depression, bargaining and acceptance. Denial response may seem like unbelief. For people who lose their loved one, this does not mean they do not know their loved one is gone. It means they use denial to escape their pain. Furthermore, according to Kubler-Ross and Kessler, “we become lost …show more content…
Juliet thinks “It was impossible to image Penelope’s having been taken in by her [Mother Shipton]” (Munro 134). Obviously, Juliet knows that Penelope leaves her behind without a word, but she still keeps on denying the heartbreaking reality and replaces it with her thinking that it is not true and she will see her daughter again to avoid the feeling of sufferance. Kubler - Ross and Kessler mention “Denial and shock help us to code and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle” (Kubler-Ross and Kessler 10). The pain of losing the loved one is too deep, she can not handle the fact that Penelope is really gone and as a result, her mind creates the lies that Penelope only temporarily goes somewhere and will return home to see her someday. And, the temporary denial seems to help Juliet evade the feelings of being left behind and sufferance for the disappearance of her daughter, however, she cannot run away from the truth forever, she forces facing it and that is the moment all the feelings she denies come and surround