Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Management of Grief, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Managing Versus Experiencing Grief
Bureaucracy
Secular vs. Spiritual
Hope, Duty, and Despair
Navigating Cultural Difference
Summary
Analysis
Shaila Bhave’s house is full of strangers—someone is boiling tea in her kitchen, and others are rummaging in the pantry to make her food. Dr. Sharma, the treasurer of the Indo-Canadian society, pulls Shaila aside to ask if she’s worried about money, but his wife scolds him not to trouble Shaila with “mundane details” right now. The treasurer’s wife asks one of her sons what the “official word” is, and he replies that it was either an accident or terrorism—possibly carried out by someone who is Sikh.
Shaila is in the throes of shock and grief when Dr. Sharma asks her about money, a question that foreshadows the conflict Shaila will later have with Judith Templeton. Similar to Judith, Dr. Sharma has an official, bureaucratic role (Judith is in charge of liaising with family members of victims of the tragedy, while Dr. Sharma is the treasurer of the Indo-Canadian society), and both seem to prioritize material goods and financial concerns over the holistic well-being of people in grief. Dr. Sharma’s wife scolds him in this case, while Shaila will later admonish Judith for doing the same. This is also the first mention of Sikh terrorists; throughout the story, Shaila will navigate her relationships with and prejudices against people who are Sikh in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Themes
In Shaila’s house, two radios play the news, plus the TV is on. A doctor has given Shaila calming pills, which may be why she feels a “deadening quiet,” even though her body is so tense. She imagines the voices of “my boys and Vikram” crying out for her. The woman boiling water says she heard the news early in the morning—at first, they said the plane simply disappeared from the radar, then there were rumors of a hijacking. Many of their neighbors were on that plane, including Shaila’s husband and sons.
While there are plenty of news sources (two radios, the TV, the people in Shaila’s house), none seem to relay reliable information about the plane’s disappearance. Instead, there are different accounts, many of them conflicting, which leave Shaila, and other loved ones of those on the plane, in a state of limbo, not knowing what might have happened, why it happened, or if they’ll ever see their loved ones again. Shaila copes with this lack of clarity and closure by taking pills that deaden her emotions, establishing a conflict between Shaila’s attempts to experience her grief and manage that grief, a conflict that will animate the rest of the story.
Themes
Shaila sits on the stairs with her neighbor, Kusum, whose husband and youngest daughter were on the plane. Kusum’s other daughter, Pam, runs by to tell her mother that she needs to get dressed to meet a reporter. Pam is the more westernized of Kusum’s daughters—the daughter on the plane was heading to India to spend the summer with her grandparents, while Pam chose to stay home and work at McDonald’s. Kusum says she isn’t going to talk to the reporter and that if she didn’t have to look after Pam, she would hang herself. Pam spits back that her mother wishes Pam were the daughter who was killed.
Pam and Kusum have different responses to being members of the Indian diaspora in Canada. Pam dates Canadian boys, works at McDonald’s, hangs out at the mall, and chose to stay home instead of visit her grandparents. It appears, then, that Pam navigates differences between Indian culture and Canadian culture by, in part, throwing herself into Canadian culture, but Pam’s mother seems to resent her for making those choices, taking them, in some ways, as Pam turning her back on Kusum, her family, and her family’s connection to India. Kusum, in her grief, says that if she didn’t have to look after Pam, she would hang herself, showing not just the depth of her grief, but also that she, in some ways, views Pam as an obligation, someone she is bound by duty to take care of, not someone she takes care of out of joy or because it sustains her.
Themes
Judith Templeton, a Canadian government official, visits Shaila’s house. Shaila offers tea and slightly stale biscuits, which Judith refuses out of politeness, but Shaila insists. Judith says she has a degree in social work and has worked with accident victims before, but never on the scale of this tragedy.
Judith’s reference to her degree in social work is the first hint that her knowledge might come from textbooks and classrooms, rather than from lived experience or engaged empathy.
Themes
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Judith needs to reach hundreds of people, some of whom, she says, “speak no English.” Others are widows who have “never handled money or gone on a bus” or wives who are “still hysterical” and husbands “in shock and profound depression.” She tells Shaila that the government wants to distribute money to some and have others sign legal documents, and she asks for Shaila’s help in reaching out to people with whom she has struggled to communicate, explaining that she would like assistance navigating “the complications of culture, language, and customs.”
Judith is the bureaucratic liaison between the Canadian government and relatives of those who died in the tragedy. Her descriptions of people she is supposed to help verge on disparaging: people “speak no English,” have “never handled money or gone on a bus,” are “still hysterical.” Though early in the story, there is a sense of exasperation in what Judith says, a sense that comes to the forefront when Judith explains that she is asking for assistance navigating the “complications of culture, language, and customs.” To Judith, that’s exactly what people with different cultures, languages, and customs are: complications. Her bureaucratic coldness and cultural ineptitude combine to make her the story’s antagonist.
Themes
Judith tells Shaila that everyone she has talked to has remarked on Shaila’s strength—Shaila has responded to the tragedy with extraordinary calm, Judith reasons. If others talked with Shaila, maybe it would help them. Shaila thinks of her calmness as strange and painful, believing herself to be “a freak.” She wishes she could “scream, starve, jump from a bridge,” anything to feel her emotions fully. That calmness would also seem bad and odd to the people Judith calls “hysterical.” Shaila tells Judith that she won’t be any help to her and that everyone must grieve in their own way, but Shaila agrees to let Judith call after Shaila returns from her trip to Ireland.
Instead of feeling comforted by her calmness, or seeing it as a sign of strength, Shaila feels trapped in it. Instead of managing her grief with medication, Shaila wants to experience it fully and feel it completely, even if that experience is painful. Shaila tries to explain that others will also be suspicious of her calmness, but Judith cannot see outside of her own narrow perspective and worldview, identifying calmness in the face of tragedy with strength and holding unwaveringly to that view, without apparent reflection.
Themes
Four days later, Shaila is in Ireland, where she sees Kusum sitting on a rock overlooking the bay. Shaila thinks of her sons and husband lost in that ocean and of Kusum stumbling and screaming onto her lawn after she first heard of the tragedy. Shaila says police and diplomats have kept relatives informed of developments in the tragedy because they believe “knowledge is helpful to the grieving.” Shaila says maybe that’s true, but that other people she knows seek solace in their own versions of events: that the plane split in two, unconsciousness was instantaneous, and no one suffered. Kusum tells Shaila that “we can’t escape our fate.” She says that her swami told her that fate led everyone, no matter their religion, on that plane to die. Shaila says that, for her part, she has her Valium.
Shaila describes how loved ones of those killed in the tragedy are navigating their grief. Some invent more palatable, less upsetting stories about what happened. Some, like Kusum, seek solace in religion and spiritual explanations of what happened. Shaila, on the other hand, manages her more overwhelming emotions with Valium. In contradiction to the one-size-fits-all textbook models of grief management later espoused by Judith Templeton, Shaila seems to observe that there are as many ways to process grief as there are people grieving. And, similar to Judith, though the police are not experiencing the grief of the people they are ostensibly helping, they also have their own ideas and opinions about how that grief should be “managed.”
Themes
Shaila and Kusum, along with other relatives of those lost in the tragedy, have traveled to Ireland to identify the bodies of their loved ones. While on the shore, Kusum tells Shaila how warm the water is. Shaila says that they can’t give in to their grief, that they have to wait for their own time to come. Shaila hasn’t eaten or brushed her teeth in four days. Kusum’s swami has told her that it’s selfish to grieve for her husband and daughter; instead, she should be thrilled for them because they are in a better place. Shaila wonders if she’s selfish as she runs along the shore, thinking that maybe her sons hadn’t been trapped under the plane a mile under the ocean surface, maybe the current had dragged them to shore, especially since they had been good swimmers.
Kusum continues to reflect on the advice and insight her swami offered, which might provide a spiritual path for processing her grief. Kusum doesn’t seem to be in a place where she can accept or believe what her swami tells her, though. When Kusum says the water feels warm, Shaila senses a longing for relief, that Kusum wants to let herself be swept away by the waves, and Shaila tells her, gently, that they can’t seek that kind of solace; they have to wait for healing to come. Shaila feels a surge of hope, too, when she begins to let herself think that maybe her sons haven’t drowned, that maybe they are still alive.
Themes
Dr. Ranganathan, an electrical engineer who lost a large family in the tragedy, joins Shaila and Kusum on the shore. He tells Shaila that, with some luck, someone might have survived the plane crash by swimming to any number of small islands. Shaila points out that her older son, Vinod, was a strong swimmer. Dr. Ranganathan says a strong swimmer could pull a younger boy, like Shaila’s younger son, to safety, which fills Shaila with hope. Dr. Ranganathan adds that it “is a parent’s duty to hope.”
Dr. Ranganathan tells Shaila that it is “a parent’s duty to hope,” meaning that a parent must maintain a connection to their children through that hope. Shaila feels buoyed by the hope that her sons might have survived, and that hope allows her sons to remain meaningfully alive, if not in the tangible, material world, then in Shaila’s internal, spiritual world. Shaila later struggles to explain to Judith that this world is just as vivid, real, and meaningful to her as the material world.
Themes
Shaila thinks that Dr. Ranganathan’s world-renowned work in electrical engineering gives him special insight into the inner workings of the universe. He is carrying roses in his pockets and asks Shaila if she would like to let some float away in the ocean in honor of her family members. Instead, Shaila has brought a pocket calculator for her son Vinod, a half-painted model B-52 for her son Mithun, and a poem she wrote for her husband to let him know her true feelings. She lets each object float away in the ocean before boarding the bus to return to the hospital.
Shaila is comforted not just by Dr. Ranganathan’s guidance that hope is still meaningful, but by the authority that has been conferred on him by the scientific community. Importantly, Dr. Ranganathan’s scientific pragmatism comes alongside his lived experience grieving his family, as well as deep reserves of empathy, as he comforts Shaila. Shaila then lets an object for each of her lost family members float away in the ocean, showing the complexity of Shaila’s grief, as she clings to hope that they might be alive while simultaneously performing a ritual that might let them rest, in their passing, a little more peacefully.
Themes
Shaila says that Kusum is one of the “lucky ones”: she has quickly identified her loved ones so can fly to India to give them a proper burial. Shaila still hasn’t identified her husband or sons. Dr. Ranganathan accompanies her to the hospital to look at photos. Police show Shaila a photo of a boy who resembles Vinod, but Shaila says that it is not him. The police officer says that after people have been in the water for a while, they look heavier. Shaila still insists that the boy in the photo is not her son. Instead of feeling discouraged after the encounter, Shaila feels “ecstatic” with the hope that her family might still be alive. The suitcase in her hotel room is packed with dry clothes for her sons.
The police, the supposed authorities in this setting, seem convinced that the boy in one of their photos is Shaila’s son, while Shaila repeatedly tells them that it’s not. The moment when she walks out of the hospital feeling ecstatic and hopeful foreshadows the interaction that Shaila and Judith will later have with the elderly Sikh couple, where Judith, the supposed authority in that situation, exhausts all available options to try and get the couple to acknowledge that their sons have passed away. The couple, similar to Shaila at the police station, refuses to do so, clinging to a kind of hope not necessarily grounded in the concrete world, but one that is essential to the duty they feel toward their children.
Themes
From Ireland, Shaila and Kusum travel to India to arrange funerals for their family members. At the Bombay airport, a customs official won’t let Kusum and Shaila pass because his boss isn’t present. Frustrated, Shaila yells at the man, “You bastard… you think we’re smuggling contraband in these coffins!”
Shaila confronts a customs official who prioritizes bureaucratic procedures (waiting for his boss) over the well-being of grieving people directly in front of him. He not only blocks Shaila and Kusum’s path, but he also implicitly suggests that they might be doing the same thing as what terrorists who killed their family members did, smuggling contraband past airport authorities. That suggestion, combined with the pointlessness of the bureaucratic holdup, irritates Shaila beyond what she can stand, foreshadowing the kind of frustration that she will later feel toward Judith.
Themes
In India, Shaila stays with her parents. Friends and family members come to visit, some of whom are Sikh, and Shaila finds herself involuntarily recoiling from those Sikh visitors. She points out that her parents don’t do the same, that they are progressive people who wouldn’t blame communities for the actions of individuals. Shaila’s mother wants her to stay longer in India, and she stays for three months, then another month after that. Shaila’s mother is a “rationalist,” while her grandmother had “kept stubborn faith in Vedic rituals,” and Shaila feels trapped between these two modes of knowledge.
Shaila finds herself involuntarily recoiling from Sikh visitors, while she also observes that her parents don’t do the same, that they don’t paint entire communities with one wide swath. This tendency to recoil puts into perspective Shaila’s own shortcomings in conversation with Judith, who seems to understand everyone involved in the attack as “Indian,” or, more to the point, as “other,” no matter how different they might be, or how different the cultures they come from might be. Without meaning to, Shaila thinks in a similar kind of way about Sikh people after the attack, painting them with a broad and inaccurate brush. This kind of prejudice, which blows past complexity, nuance, empathy, and understanding, is juxtaposed against Shaila’s nuanced description of her own background and the push and pull she feels between the secular and spiritual worlds.
Themes
Shaila travels through India, playing contract bridge in gymkhana clubs and visiting holy sites she hasn’t visited before. People who have become widowers through the tragedy are being shown candidates for new brides. Shaila counts herself lucky that no one thinks of arranging a husband for her, an “unlucky widow.” Six months into her travels, in a temple in a Himalayan town, she sees a vision of her husband. Her husband descends to her, taking her hand in his before telling her that she must “finish alone what [they] started together.” When Shaila’s mother, who doesn’t believe in ghosts or visions, asks Shaila if she noticed anything strange in the temple, Shaila says no.
The push and pull Shaila feels between the secular and spiritual worlds comes to a head when Shaila sees a vision of her husband when she visits the Himalayan temple. Shaila keeps the vision a secret from her mother, assuming her mother wouldn’t understand. For Shaila, though, this vision (and the ones that follow) become central to her journey to navigate grief, just as real, meaningful, and deserving of consideration as anything that might fit within her mother’s “rational” worldview.
Themes
Shaila returns to Canada. Kusum has put her house up for sale and plans to pursue inner peace in an ashram in Hardwar run by her swami. Shaila stays in touch with others who lost loved ones in the tragedy. The tragedy brought them together, “melted down and recast [them] as a new tribe.” Kusum’s daughter, Pam, has left for California. Dr. Ranganathan calls Shaila twice a week from Montreal but has recently gotten a job in Ottawa. Still, he can’t bring himself to sell his house, which he has turned into a “temple” to the family he lost, the master bedroom a “shrine,” while he, “a devotee,” sleeps on a cot.
Shaila, Kusum, and Dr. Ranganathan are exemplars of different ways that grief affects people and the different ways people move through that grief. Shaila points out that both Kusum and Dr. Ranganathan process their grief spiritually. Kusum does so directly by moving to an ashram and seeking inner peace, and Dr. Ranganathan more subtly, though apparently no less passionately, by becoming a “devotee” in the shrine he has built for his departed family.
Themes
Judith Templeton enlists Shaila to visit an elderly couple, who is Sikh, and whose sons were on the plane. The couple has not yet signed papers that would ensure they receive government benefits. Judith explains to Shaila that some surviving relatives are still “hysterical” and shares with Shaila the steps of grief that she has learned from textbooks on “grief management”: rejection, depression, acceptance, and reconstruction. Six months after the tragedy, only a few relatives are “reconstructing,” Judith says. Many, according to Judith, are stuck in a state of depressed acceptance. Shaila finds herself unable to tell Judith that her family surrounds her, that they change shapes to appear to her, and that her days and nights have become thrilling as a result.
Judith’s understanding of grief seems to come mainly, if not exclusively, from textbooks. She also seems stubborn in her wrong-headedness, unable to consider that there might be other ways to approach grief than the roadmap offered by those textbooks. For example, Shaila feels that her family is always with her. Shaila is unable to tell Judith about that, though, because it wouldn’t fit into the narrow understanding of grief that Judith is rigidly attached to.
Themes
In the apartment building, Shaila notices the “distinctive and immediate Indianness of frying ghee.” She tells Judith that the elderly couple will not open up to a Hindu woman like Shaila because they will view her as an outsider, and Shaila involuntarily stiffens at the sight of their beards and turbans. She notes to herself that the couple fear that signing the papers would mean selling their sons for two airline tickets to Ireland, where they would be asked to identify their sons’ bodies. In the house of the Sikh couple, the rooms are dark and stuffy, with the lights off and only an oil lamp lit on the coffee table.
Judith’s inability to understand the nuances of cultures different than hers is on full display. She fails to understand that to the Sikh couple, Shaila, who is a Hindu, will also come off as an outsider. Shaila tries to explain, but Judith doesn’t listen. Yet Shaila is guilty of her own forms of prejudice and casts some people who are different than her, people who are Sikh, as the “other.”
Themes
The elderly couple has recently come to Canada from India. Since their sons were lost in the tragedy, they haven’t been paying utility bills out of “fear and the inability to write a check.” The telephone has been shut off, and electricity, gas, and water will come next. Shaila talks with the couple in Hindi. She believes that if they think she is here as a translator, they might be offended, knowing there are thousands of Punjabi speakers and Sikhs in Toronto who would do a better job.
Shaila reiterates the differences between herself and the Sikh couple while also trying to connect with them. The interaction also highlights Judith’s cultural incompetence and further bureaucratic fumbling of the situation, by showing that Judith is seemingly oblivious to possible differences in culture, even differences such as preferred language, between Shaila and the couple.
Themes
When the elderly couple remains reluctant to sign the papers to get government assistance, Shaila tells them that she too lost her sons, as well as her husband, in the crash. The couple responds by saying that God provides and God takes away, so God will provide, not the government, and that their sons will return to help them.
The couple insists that God took their sons away and that God will provide for them, not the government. Even though the couple is in increasingly dire financial and material circumstances, they insist on prioritizing the spiritual world, and their spiritual belief in God’s ability to provide, over the government’s promises of material recompense.
Themes
When they leave the apartment, unsuccessful in getting the elderly couple to sign the papers, Judith says to Shaila, “You see what I’m up against? … Their stubbornness and ignorance is driving me crazy.” When Judith begins to complain about the next person they will visit, Shaila tells Judith to let her out at the subway. She could try to explain to Judith the error of her ways. She could tell Judith that “in our culture, a parent’s duty is to hope.” Instead, she leaves without an explanation and slams the door as she exits the car.
Judith is flummoxed by the couple’s unwillingness to sign the paper and their insistence that their sons will return. To Judith, the couple’s unwillingness to sign is rooted in superstition and ignorance. Judith shows again that she is unable or unwilling to understand perspectives that do not correspond to her own narrow worldview. Shaila considers trying to communicate the importance of that spiritual, internal world, to explain what hope means to her and to the Sikh couple, the way that it tethers those who have survived to their loved ones just as meaningfully as physical presence might. Sensing that her words would be met by more intransigence, though, Shaila leaves without any kind of explanation.
Themes
During the Toronto winter, Shaila writes letters to editors of newspapers and members of parliament. She says that now they at least acknowledge that a bomb exploded on the plane. She sets up a trust with money that her husband had saved for her sons’ education and sells her house to move to a small apartment downtown.
Shaila has taken steps to move toward a new chapter in her life, like selling her house and moving to a small apartment downtown. And, unlike the debilitating “calmness” she experienced earlier, Shaila now takes proactive steps (writing to newspaper editors and members of parliament) to try and seek justice for the people who were killed on the plane and for their relatives. In some ways, Shaila is tackling the bureaucratic establishment head-on.
Themes
Kusum writes to Shaila from Hardwar and describes a vision of her daughter fanning the coals of a kitchen fire in a hut in a small Himalayan town. Kusum asks Shaila what she thinks of that and Shaila says that she envies Kusum for having been able to see her daughter again. Kusum’s other daughter, Pam, never made it to California. Instead, Pam writes Shaila letters from Vancouver, where she works in a department store. Dr. Ranganathan accepted an academic job and moved to Texas, where “no one knows his story and he has vowed not to tell it.” He still calls Shaila once a week.
Throughout the story, Shaila, Kusum, and Dr. Ranganathan navigate the tumults of grief. Kusum does so through her spirituality and continues to see visions of her family members, which Shaila envies. After turning his house into a shrine to his lost family and turning himself into a devotee, Dr. Ranganathan moves to Texas, where no one will know about what happened to him. Shaila continues to keep in contact with both of them, as well as with Pam, showing that part of her process through her grief entails maintaining meaningful connections with those around her, as she forges a new kind of family in the most harrowing circumstances. Notably, none of these steps taken—by Shaila, Kusum, or Dr. Ranganathan—would be likely to appear in Judith Templeton’s textbook on grief management.
Themes
While walking through the park on a rare sunny, winter day, Shaila pauses on the path. She looks up into the trees and hears the voices of her family for the last time. “‘Your time has come,’ they [say]. ‘Go, be brave.’” She does not know where the voyage will lead and doesn’t know which direction she will take, but she drops her package and begins walking.
Shaila’s complicated, excruciating, and at times—as she says—“thrilling” path through grief reaches an inflection point at the end of the story. Shaila has waded through the hardest parts of her grief, come face to face with despair, and found a path that took her to the other side. In a vision, her family then tells her to move ahead, to go and be brave. Their guidance doesn’t signal the end of Shaila’s grief so much as the possibility of a fully-lived life, a life as brimming with vitality and adventure as the one she shared with her family. Shaila doesn’t know where that voyage will lead, or which direction to take, but she accepts her family’s request and begins that journey with courage.
Themes
