I wish that a book like Alicia Afterimage would be in the hands of every single high school counselor because, for example, when a tragedy like this strikes a high school, and it happens all the time, there are 5,000 teens that die every single year just in car accidents. Five thousand.
Now, multiply, if every single teen has, let’s say, ten friends, how many people are grieving. And, of course, we are not talking about the parents and the family and the relatives. So, what a book like Alicia Afterimage can do, what literature like this can do is to give the teacher, the English teacher, that the day after tragedy strikes, doesn’t know what to do with her 25 students in the classroom, a tool.
“OK, class, we’re going to open up this book. We’re going to read a chapter. And let’s start a discussion. Do you feel,” after the class has read this chapter, “Do you feel like anybody here? Or do you feel different? Would you like to write about it?” At least there is a way to start a discussion.
Oftentimes I think as teens have a difficulty talking about what they’re feeling because they don’t think anybody can understand. And this might prompt them to
to see that others have gone through it. So literature like this is needed.
I think that, at least I have felt in my experience, that here in the US, many people shy away from death. And I believe that death is part of life, and we need to talk about it. We need to talk about what happens when a friend dies? How do I cope with it? What happens when someone that I love dies? What happens when my child dies? How do I go on?
One of the things that I did was to welcome in my life anything and everything that could remotely help me. And that is one of the things that I welcome in my life was literature. I read a tremendous amount of books. Books that in my case helped me as a grieving mother.
And I found something very interesting. The books that help me the most were those that allowed me to believe that there was a way to go on, that healing was in the horizon if I chose to go towards it. And that brings me back to literature that would help the grieving teen.
You need to give them books that allow them to believe that they will heal, that life will be normal again, even if it’s a different kind of normal, even if they don’t have that loved one
physically anymore. But there is hope. They can always reestablish a new relationship with the past one.
And getting to that place, mind you, is hard, but you can get there. And if you
if books can help you through that, isn’t that a marvelous thing?
