Exploration 6

"...Sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story." This quote comes from the chapter "The Lives of the Dead". This story really affected me because it was about how Tim has learned to deal with death and how he uses stories to keep the people alive. Keeping someone’s memory alive is so important to remembering them and part of the grieving process. I can relate to wanting to remember someone and doing so by telling stories of how wonderful they were to remember and reminisce. I think it is a very important thing to do when losing someone close. Remembering those who have passed is very important to my life so I really enjoyed the story and it’s message.

The character that I can relate to the most I think is Norman. Norman experienced the tragic loss of a friend and it really messed him up. Norman felt that Kiowa's death was completely his fault, when really it wasn't, it was the war's fault. I can relate to that in way because that's how I felt when my friend Joy died of leukemia. We went to the hospital the same day and we had surgery that night but her complications and diagnosis led to her getting diagnosed with cancer and dying from it. Needless to say I felt like it was my fault for not being as sick as she was and I wanted to become more sick so she wouldn't have to struggle to survive. Her passing really messed me up in a way that I almost had Survivor's guilt and that is what Norman seems to experience.

I think that Norman is a lot like Tim Brown from Rebirth. Tim was a firefighter who lost his best friend, Terry, when the Twin Towers fell. Tim felt like it was his fault that Terry died because he did not do anything to save him. There was nothing Tim could do to save Terry because Terry was on the 89th floor when the tower fell. It wasn't Tim's fault, but it messed him up mentally just like it did when Norman could not save Kiowa. They are different in the fact that Tim was able to no longer blame himself for what happened to Terry and was able to make good of the experience and later becoming a worker for the Department of Homeland Security and an advocate of safety in the US. Norman was not able to get over what happened to Kiowa and it haunted him until he died.