Everyone copes with grief in their own way, and we all discuss it differently as well. Amy Hempel certainly shows this with her narrator and the writing style of this story. Given the fact the narrator must watch her best friend die, you would think there would be emotional scenes and long dialogues. However, this story has none of those elements. Instead, the language is sparse, with the majority of the dialogue kept to facts told by the narrator. The story itself is told in block paragraphs, and the sentences themselves are short. The language seems to be minimalistic and told in a way that suggests a slight impersonal tone. However, as the narrator says, “the impersonal…is more intimate (30).” Keeping a distance from pain is a way to deal with grief.
Amy Hempel
The narrator deals with the pain of watching her best friend die and the helplessness she feels to stop it. The narrator tells us it was two months before she visited her friend in the hospital; she was afraid to watch her best friend die. As she says,
“The best I can explain it is this…a man wrecked his car on 101 going south. But he did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death. I mean, he died. So I hadn’t dared to look any closer. But now I’m doing it—and hoping that I will live through it (31).”
She didn’t know if she could handle pain or bare the sight of her best friend’s slow death.
Both the narrator and her best friend avoid directly talking about the inevitable. They make jokes with each other and talk of trivia and friends, but every so often we get a glimpse of the pain and grief the narrator feels. On page 34, she says,
“Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not…I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.”
The emotional state of the narrator is clearer when she refuses to spend the night in the hospital with her friend. The following passage clearly articulates this:
“She thought I meant home to her house in the canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.
I felt weak and small and failed (38).”
Amy Hempel writes an incredibly moving story of grief, the inevitability of death, and the ways in which we deal with the loss. Her narrator still feels deep pain and conveys this grief in seven short pages, but those pages carry a wealth of emotion. Death is, after all, a part of life, and Amy shows just one of the ways we talk about it.
As you point out, the writing style for this short story is kind of impersonal with how distanced the narrator appears to be from the other girl in the story. When I think about it the entire dialogue between the two characters is the unimportant facts that she asks the narrator to tell. It seems to be that the sick girl is trying to avoid the reality of her situation and the narrator is maybe afraid to say anything different.
You pointed out several facets I previously hadn’t noticed, like the narrator sticking to facts/factual stories. I’m going to go back and read the story to get a better look at all of the aspects you pointed out.