Death is imminent to everyone, no one can escape from it sadly. Death can be describe as a permanent cessation of all vitals functioning; the end of life. It doesn’t matter if you’re the happiest person, or the poorest, you could be the most powerful beast in the African savannah, and we are all equals when it comes to dying. You don’t take nothing from this world when you die. Only dead memories that sooner or later wanders off like nothing had happen. But what happens to the family that’s left behind once someone decays off, to the unknown. A death in a family can leave many psychological problems in someone mind.
It can do many damages through time and lead to more difficulties. One of the problems death bought in the novel “Everything I never told you” by Celeste Ng, was that the family that Lydia left behind because of her death, was unstable. The death had triggered James and his family; the father. It led them to do unconscious mind to do acts unheard of. Through Freud’s concept of psychoanalysis and using the novel everything I never told you, as well as movies that compare to the novel like Boys in the hood, Rosemary baby and Maria Full of grace on how deaths of important characters take a major toll on everyone else.
In the novel Everything I Never Told You we first encounter the Lees. They are a middle class Asian American family in a residential area in Ohio around the 1970s. The novel starts off by stating that one of the main characters is dead. The first page of the novel starts by saying “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. ” After the middle child Lydia disappears and is discovered dead at the bottom of a lake, the Lees will have to revisit painful memories that have contributed to extremely tense and fragile family.
Through shifting perspectives and shifts in time, Everything I Never Told You explores the danger in silence and repression and the effects of never voicing how you really feel. Sigmund Freud’s mentions the conscious mind which is being aware and having control thoughts, and pre-conscious mind which is having the ability to recall thoughts and feeling without the sense of repression. He also mentions how the mind is like an iceberg. His theory of consciousness suggested an iceberg diagram– the tip of the iceberg that we see is the conscious mind, with the massive chunk of ice underwater that we couldn’t see from above, the unconscious mind.
The tip of the iceberg consists of the Ego and the super-ego. Below the iceberg we see the unconscious mind consist of the Id and with a little bit of both the ego and the super-ego. All of this is part of psychoanalysis. One way in which Lydia family felt the need of silence is when James tells Lydia” how’s pam doing? ” Lydia says, “Oh, she’s great, she just made the pep squad (Everything I never told you, Celeste Ng, Pg. 16). Nathan knew this was a lie. Lydia had little to know friends. But when she passed away there was no way Nathan can tell that to his parents.
Her parents were making a list on who to contact to see about her whereabouts however only Jack, a noisy neighbor, would be the only one but he already had given a no on her whereabouts. Nathan feels like he needs someone to be blame for her sister’s untimely death. While in the funeral Nathan couldn’t help but to make Jack a suspect. He chose Jack because early on around spring Lydia and Jack have been going out on car rides. Although Jack is known to do this with many other girls, he has chosen to go with Lydia and that’s why he was a suspect not only to Nathan, but to the police as well.
When Jack was about to leave the Funeral Nathan weaves his way towards him. Jack trying to counsel him. Right when Jack was about to leave something in Nathan triggered on and grabbed Jack by his arm and said” Are you?. . . You know the police wants to talk to you. . . Look I know she was you that Monday”. Little by little Nathan was pressing up on Jack and started to interrogate him. Nathan never grabbed anyone before, he felt strong about himself. It was something that Nathan was never thought he would do. The death of Lydia bought out anger in him.
He feels like someone has done it to her, and without thinking the “id” in his head took over. The id is something that we do as an instinct that we have in our unconscious mind. Without thinking Nathan had Jack on the ropes without letting him explain himself that day he was with Lydia. After things cooled down Nathan finds out about something that made him think twice about Lydia death. When snooping around the police interrogating Jack he found out that her sister had many problems. When the police ask about Lydia and if she was upset at something Jack said” upset about everything . . about her grades. About her parents. About her brother leaving college. Lots of things”.
This shows how Lydia was swore to silence by her family causing her to feel anxious and depressed, but it came as a shock to Nathan when he heard that. Depression has always been related to a death in a family. In a recent study done by the department of psychology shows that depression is directed towards the mind. “For example (Maciejewski, Zhang, Block, and Prigerson (2007) found that yearning and depression were the most frequent psychological responses to death before the acceptance of death.
Also, depressive mood in normally bereaved individuals tends to peak at approximately 6 months post loss and does not occur prior to 2 months post loss”. We see that Nathan is dealing with Lydias death in a sensitive way. Hes taking all his confusion and his tender feelings and applying it to Jack. “Although it may be true that a direct intervention is going to produce stronger results, it is possible that targeting teen’s self-concept after death in a family may help children and teens to have fewer depression symptoms later. (Maciejewski, Zhang, Block, and Prigerson (2007)” Although that one thing that the Lee’s didn’t do.
An intervention not only to Nathan but to Lydia. It could even probably save her life. All the signs of depression indicates that Lydia committed suicide, because she was forced to keep her silence and was forced upon doing something she felt she wasn’t ready for like becoming a doctor. Although she wanted to be just like her mother; Marilyn. But she ended up carrying too much pressure to the point where Lydia was in her knees again. Lydia ended up failing physics, but only told Jack, not her mother. When Lydia’s mother was asking how physics was going, she lied and said “fine. . . Better. It’s getting better . . we haven’t had a test yet. But I’m doing okay on the homework.
Lydia jabbed her fork into a wedge of tomato, only the wistfulness in her mother’s voice stopped her from screaming (Everything I never told you, Ng, page 183-185)”. It shows her struggle and feels the pressure of her mom crumbling into her. Problems with suicide or suicide attempt is very common amongst Chinese culture. In a research done by Committee mental Health, shows that people from China have a pattern of suicide. “It is particularly important in China as its suicide rates are higher than the world average (WHO 2005).
A study published in 2002 reported suicide as the fifth leading cause of death with a mean annual rate of 23/ 100,000, for a total of 287,000 suicide deaths per year (3. 6% of all deaths) in China (Phillips et al. 2002). The demographic pattern of Chinese suicide—with rural rates two to three-fold greater than the urban rates, and rates among women slightly higher than among men—is different from that reported in Western countries, where rates in urban and rural areas are roughly equivalent and rates of suicide in men are two- to four-fold higher than in women (Durkheim 1951; Wang et al. 2008)”.
Lydia could have been link to depression because of her demographic. Going back to Lydia’s family we find out about James affair with Marilyn. The feeling of pressure that the autopsy report on her daughter made him feel nauseas and traumatizing. HE knows he couldn’t go to his wife with these reports so he decides to take the papers to work and keep them locked away. He never wanted to see it but didn’t want it to throw it away. When everyone was out to lunch he finally took a deep breath and open the enveloped. He found all types of things that a Father shouldn’t know like; “The color and size of each organ, the weight of her brain.
That a white foam had bubbled up through her trachea and covered her nostrils and mouth like a lace handkerchief”. This put James into an awkward situation and makes his body tremble to the core. James wouldn’t let Marilyn ever see the report because it will ruin her heart. The body that they both loved and cherish was cut up, empty inside. While looking at the autopsy report Louisa came in. She then stands besides James and takes the autopsy paper away from him. Louisa takes a look at them and says without no emotion “you shouldn’t be here”. Then touches James back and tells him “Why don’t you come to my apartment.
I’ll cook you some lunch”. The apartment is six blocks away from the campus. When they both enter Louisa apartment they start kissing each other without hesitation and Louisa started to undo the bottom of the shirt. James slept with Louisa. He found himself at the end finally having a good night rest for the first time, ever since Lydia die. “He sleeps soundly for the first time in days, a dreamless sleep: his mind, for the moment, gone blissfully blank” (Everything I never told you, Ng, page 70-73). From this situation we see that James struggles to accept his daughter’s death.
He tries to escape his thoughts and feelings by sleeping with Louisa. All the guilt and frustration was all gone for that moment. That’s one of the reasons why a death in a family makes you do unexpected things. The impact of a family’s death system creates a structural void that requires many adjustment in your life. It makes the unconscious come to life as well as the id. We see that with James affair, and with Nathans overreacting. This is because the id, according to Freud, “based on instinct, and primal desires” (The ego, Super Ego, and the Id, Freud).
Death in a family can bring many unseen changes. A movie that backs up my thesis is Boyz in the Hood. Boyz in the hood is a movie based on south central, California in the early 90s. “Tre is sent to live with his father, Furious Styles in South Central Los Angeles. Although his hard-nosed father instills proper values and respect in him, and his devout girlfriend Brandi teaches him about faith, Tre’s friends Doughboy and Ricky don’t have the same kind of support and are drawn into the neighborhood’s booming drug and gang culture, with increasingly tragic results. ( Google summary synopsis, B. I. T. H)”
In the movie we see Doughboys brother Ricky, getting an opportunity to accomplishes something in his life. He has a chance to go to college with a scholarship for Football. Ricky was talented football player in his short career playing high school Football. However, after a rough argument with his brother Dough boy, he ends up having a feud with him. Doughboy ends up punching Ricky causing Ricky to feel angry and distraught. Tre and the other people that were there, break up the fight. Ricky then by himself ends up going to the store to buy lottery tickets and some products for the house.
As he was returning home, a car full of gang members drive up and shoots Ricky until he’s dead. Tre ends up finding Ricky body lying on the floor crying while Dough boy drives up to pick up the body. Without hesitation, Doughboy already knows who did it and wants vengeance for his brother’s death. He then goes first to leave his brothers decease corpse to his house with his mother. He grabs his AK-47 and with his friends, decides to go hunt sown the killers of his brother. Later on, Dough boy finds the Murderers who killed his brother eating at a burger shop.
He quickly drives by them and shoots every single one without hesitation. This shows how someone death can cause a sense of vengeance. Doughboys first instinct was to execute the people who cause him and his family so much sadness and anger. Without thinking his instinct took control of him and waited no time to search and destroy his enemies. In the movie Rosemary’s baby, we see how Rosemary is treated, like she’s helpless. When she is told by the doctors that she lost her baby she went in denial. Rosemary couldn’t believe in what she was hearing. The baby that she nurture and loved was “dead”.
Only to find out later that the same doctors and neighbors had the baby and was using it for satanic purposes. But in her head the baby that Rosemary carried was dead to her, while her obsession of wanting one carried on too her original baby. At the end of the movie, it shows rosemary rocking her baby, as a sign of acceptance. Maria full of grace deals with Death in a different way. In Maria full of Grace we see Maria struggling to make money for her family. When she loses her job at the flower Factory, she goes to seek for a job in Bogota Colombia.
However, going to Colombia she gets offered a job to be a drug mule. Desperate, she accepts the risky offer, and swallows 62 wrapped pellets of drugs and flies to New York City with her friend Blanca, who has also been recruited as a drug mule. Maria also meets someone who is experience drug trafficking, her name is Lucy. Lucy falls ill in the plane. The mules are held in a motel room until they pass all the drug pellets. Lucy falls even sicker when a drug pellet apparently splits inside her. Unknown to the traffickers, Maria witnesses them carrying Lucy out of the hotel room.
Then she sees blood stains in the bathtub. She comes to the conclusion that the traffickers cut her open to retrieve the other drug pellets inside her body. Scared, Maria convinces Blanca to escape with her while the traffickers are gone. They leave with the drugs they have passed. Lucy mentions to Maria about having a sister in New York City. When she runs away with Blanca, Maria feels an obligation to let Lucy’s sister know about her death. Nevertheless struggles to tell her and ends up staying in her apartment for some time.
Sooner or later the secret comes out and Lucy’s sister kicks both Maria, and Blanca out. Feeling remorse and guilty, Maria uses some of her drug money to send Lucy’s body home to Colombia for a proper burial. In conclusion, a death in a family can cause many problems over all. It brings the worst out in a person. None really knows how to deal with death because it’s unpredictable, it’s always going to be there. You can’t run away from the death at the end of the day, but we could find a way to control our mind when the day comes.
