Losing A Loved One In James Mcbride's The Color Of Water

No matter who you are, facing the death of a loved one is not easy. When people lose someone important in life, they often face depression or lead to decisions that will sooner or later lead to bad habits. Those bad habits they start to develop eventually become who they are. Some people don’t know how to cope with the death of a loved one and end up running away from their problems. In James McBride’s The Color of Water , readers discover how losing a loved one often leads to self-destructive behavior. Losing a loved one causes you to go blind as if you’re in a dark void. For instance, James shows this in Rachel’s behaviors when he states, “For months after my stepfather died, Mommy walked around the house as if she were blind, staggering through the motions of life” (137). In other words, Rachel is walking as if she is dead. After facing the death of her two husbands, Rachel starts to go crazy. Her actions and behaviors also become careless. Her poverty becomes even worse and she is left to support her twelve children on her own. She doesn’t know what to do with her life since her husbands have passed away. The death of her two husbands make Rachel fall into deep …show more content…
For instance. James shows his destructive choices when he writes, “I snatched purses. I shoplifted. I even robbed a petty drug dealer once. I virtually dropped out of high school after he died, failing every class” (6). Instead of continuing his regular life of being a good student, he decides to steal. After this step father’s death, James starts getting into bad habits. Now that his father has passed away, he doesn’t know what to do and thus gets into bad habits of stealing. His actions of stealing would soon shape him as a person and in the end cause him to go to jail. James was considered lucky, since some people make even worse choices such as committing suicide. The self-destructive behavior James chooses is stealing from