Essay of "Death by Landscape"

How do people cope with their pasts?

“Death by Landscape” Margaret Atwood

When traumatic events occur in people’s lives, it often shapes how that person turns out as an adult. Their pasts can affect them positively or negatively, and this depends on how that person copes with it. The numerous methods of dealing with harrowing past experiences all vary in success, and many books, stories, and movies display how the choice of coping affects their lives. The character Lois in the short story “Death by Landscape”, written by Margaret Atwood, shows contrasting ways of dealing with a childhood memory and how they can have effects on life.

As people often do, Lois molds her life around an event in her past that disturbs her. During her childhood years, Lois experienced trauma when her best friend Lucy went missing, and was given the blame for it. Even though evidence in the story helps us to surmise that Lois did not kill Lucy, a sense of guilt from Lucy’s mysterious death infringes itself into her psyche; she felt as if she could of stopped it from happening. Lois “was living not one life but two: her own, and another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized” (107). The immense guilt that festers inside tears her up and she starts to deteriorate into loneliness and depression, even omitting her family from her thoughts, seeming to estrange herself from everyone. Lois blames herself for her terrible past, and this illustrates one of the ways she coped with Lucy’s death. By doing this, she caused herself harm and sadness, indicating that this method is not a positive way of dealing with the past.

Lois’ blame of herself proved an unproductive way of coping with the past because it affected her life negatively, but her other method seemed to provide closure. Often when people pass away, they create memorials and graves that represent the memory of a deceased person. Lois does something similar to this. She has pictures of nature...