There are two characters in the story that stand out to me as suffering from the burden of knowing: Lily and May. Lily has lived her entire life with the memory of her mother’s death, and how she was the one who was at fault for the accident. Before she went to Tiburon to live with the calendar sisters, Lily had no idea of the circumstances in which she last saw her mother. This would be the burden of not knowing: not knowing why her mother left, not knowing her mother her whole life. Lily finds out through August Boatwright that her mother, indeed, left her. However, she also finds out that the day her mother died was the day she decided to come back for Lily and take her to live in Tiburon with the calendar sisters. When Lily founds out the truth about her mother and her mother’s past, she is weighted with all her mistakes and lies. She now has the burden of knowing the truth when she has been creating a façade of her mother this whole time. Lily had always thought of her mother as a woman who cared deeply about her child, but it turns out that she was saddened by Lily’s arrival. Lily goes on to say that she wishes she could erase everything she just heard from August. Also, Lily lives with the knowing that one day the police might come for her and Rosaleen and that her happy life in Tiburon may come to an abrupt end.
May, one of the calendar sisters, also suffers from the burden of knowing. It’s explained in the book that after her twin sister, April, died, May started to feel things differently. In the void of her dead sister, May filled it with the hurt of others. She started to take on other people’s grief and created her own unnecessary burden of knowing the hurt of the world. Even the small things like a spilled glass of water would send her into her world and she would have to hum to keep herself occupied. May’s burden of knowing is not as great as Lily’s, but she, too, suffers from knowing things she wishes she did not.
Lily and May have lived most of their lives creating a burden that only they could carry. Lily suffers each day from her burden and she is remarkably strong enough to swallow it and still find room to care about others first. May also suffers each day, but for different reasons. May has many reasons in a day why she suffers while Lily has only one reason, and that is her mother. The difference between these two characters is that they possess burdens of different magnitude, and the similarity is that they carry the burdens of others.
I’m about 50 pages shy of finishing the book and I wonder how Lily will come to terms with the news that she just received from August. I wonder if she will settle between hating and loving her mother.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree that the burden of knowing what happened with her mother must have been really hard for Lily. It must have been really hard to live your life thinking that your mother really loved you and then later find out that she abandoned you, even if she did eventually come back. Knowing that your parent walked away from you has to be a horrible feeling. I can only imagine how painful it would be to hear that. But at the same time I think that actually knowing something could be better than just wondering your whole life even if what you find out isn’t exactly what you want to here. I think that is probably why so many adopted people go looking for their birth parents; they need to know the truth behind why they were given up otherwise they might wonder forever if they were ever loved by their parents.
ReplyDeleteI also felt that Lily and May seemed to suffer the most out of all the characters. Lily suffered through all the secrets that she felt made her worthless and bad, she honestly felt that she had killed her mother, and with that facade that she built up it seemed as if because she viewed her mother as perfection, she felt even more guilt over taking out such a good person and mother. When August told her that her mother had at first left her and then come back, I think it gave Lily a reason to let go of her guilt, yes at first she was angry, but later she was able to accept everything that had been done to her, her mothers leaving and T. Ray’s abuse. I think Lily was able to let go because she finally saw that her mother was not a paragon, she was a normal flawed human being and I think it showed her that it is alright to be just that. With May I viewed her more as a literal example of the suffering of Lily and the other characters, she felt everything, and every sorrow was amplified for her and these sorrows belonged to others. When she died I felt that this was a foreshadowing of the characters finally being able to let go of their fears and burdens, and in the end this turns out to be the case.
ReplyDeleteI had very similar thoughts and statements like yours in my blog. I agree with everything you stated especially how Lily’s burden of knowing was when she thought she killed her mother and also when she found out that her mother left her and didn’t want her. She must have felt even worse that her own mother who she thought was a great person didn’t want her or love her. Even though she came back, leaving once is all it takes. She left and there’s no excuse for that. I could only imagine how I would feel if I found out my mom didn’t want me and left me. I love and care for my mom so much that it would hurt me to find that out, I wouldn’t know what to do. Also when you brought up May’s burden of knowing, it’s not as bad as Lily’s but she suffers from it and wishes she didn’t know what she did. It’s so bad that she has to hum to try to escape the thoughts. It was a good blog.
ReplyDeleteI think that you are exactly right; these two characters do carry a lot of weight on their shoulders but in two completely different ways. I think that deep down Lily knows what really happened to her mother but like most people who go through something life altering and significant they block things out and completely forget. It’s like they cannot access that part of their brain. It seems to me like August holds a lot of burden on her shoulders as well. After all, she knows that Lily and August are not telling the truth but she chooses to let them stay in her house and help her with house work and keeping up with the bees. She openly welcomes them into her private sanctuary without any questions and blind faith. August knows that they are in some kind of trouble or that something bad has happened to them to lead them to her door step. That in my opinion is a great burden as well, especially with August and her family being colored, she knows that if they were to get caught keeping Lily and August when they were in trouble then she and her family would get in a great magnitude of trouble as well. I haven’t finished the book yet either so I do hope that everything works out well in the end. I would really hope to see something bad happen to any of the calendar sisters or Rosaleen or Lily.
ReplyDelete