A: ”Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” It hurts to be separated from a person you love. It hurts unbelievable much. But how many tears are supposed to roll before you are ready to let go? There is no answer to how you get through the pain, and how you come to terms with the terrible experience of loosing someone special. Robin Black’s short story “Divorces, Beheaded, Survived” illuminate the troubles that death can bring upon a family. The main question in the short story is: How do you move on when a beloved person close to you dies? And when is it okay to let the memory of this person go? Robin Black’s short story is a great illustration of how these problems affect our every day life. ”Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” is a thought-provoking short story written by the author, Robin Black. The short story is about a woman named Sara. The short story begins in medias res where we get presented to Sara’s friends, who are playing the loyal family. The short story moves frequently in time, from past to present and from present to past. This kind of structure gives the story an interesting touch and makes it very fascinating to read because it reveals the age of some persons beneath the lines, as seen in the following quote: “Johnny was a tear younger than Terry, a your older than me.” You have to use your head through the story, and you wont get all the information served on a plate. Sara is the story’s first person narrator, and she tells us about how she used to play with her friends and her brother in their garden. Her brother’s name is Terry. They had a common friend named Johnny Sanderson. He was the director of the play that they were playing. The play was about King Henry the 8th and all of his wives. Therefore the title of the short story is “Divorced, Beheaded, Survived,” because his first wife got divorces from him, the second wife was beheaded and the third wife died of natural causes. The title is a symbol of, the fact that even though something as terrible as death happens in such a young age, life go on and even though it seems very hard and difficult, you will eventually learn to live with it. In the end, you will survive. It may seem strange why children would play such a horrible play where people die, but it is all a part of being a child. Death is an unknown subject for them, and therefore they are very absorbed by death, therefore they actually fight over who gets to be the one who gets killed. But when death gets close to them, they distance themselves from it. Sara’s brother, Terry, causes the statement of problems in this short story, because he catches a life-threatening illness, which he dies from only a few months after their play in the garden. After his death everything changes. Since his death their friends stopped talking to Sara. We are told all this 30 years later in the present of the story. Sara is obviously affected by her brother’s death but now she is living a calm life with her husband, Lyle, and her two children, Mark and Coco. But one day something awful happens. The phone rings and it is one of Mark’s friends who is calling. His friend had been killed in a car accident. She is still scarred from when her brother died and that marks her reaction: “I didn’t speak. Can’t be. I know that feeling. Can’t be. But is.” All her feelings from when her brother died come floating back to her. She is very irrational towards the discussion of death. Since she got her first child, she has tried to make them different from how her and her brother was. She was two years younger than Terry and therefore she made sure there would be more than two years between her children. Sara explained the consequences of her brother’s death and some may wonder if the same consequences will happen for Mark. After his friend’s death he does not talk much with his friends for an unknown period of time. “And I don’t think Mark’s spoken very much to any of his friends since then.” This proves that Mark might be experiencing the same as his mother did back when her brother died. Even though it was only Mark’s friend and not his brother, he might have been a brother to him. Mark has probably not spoken to Peter’s siblings since his death and they symbolizes Sara in this case. But since we do not know how close Mark and Peter were, we can not conclude if this is the same situation as Sara’s situation. There are many flashbacks in this story and that might be why Robin Black decided to avid a huge climax and the end of the story. Often, the last line in stories reveal a secret or some very important information, but in this short story the last lines basically describes that the terrible event in her life has happened, and therefore she is just clarifying how that event has affected her life. The last sentence in the story is: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” Miss Rafferty wrote the rhyme out on the board while Molly Denham and I dutifully copied it into our notebooks, as though we might otherwise forget.” And it is a symbol on how they both want to believe, the fact that they do not know anything about King Henry VIII because they want to avoid being reminded of their heartbreaking childhood, where their beloved friend died. The message Robin Black is trying to send is that you will get through any rough time in your life no matter how hard it is, and there is no right way of doing it. It seem very hard at first, but later it will not seem as hard as in the beginning, and it is okay to block it out of one’s mind. It does not make you a bad person.

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[ 1 ]. ”Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” S. 2, l. 29
[ 2 ]. ”Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” S. 5, l. 124
[ 3 ]. ”Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” S. 5, l. 148
[ 4 ]. ”Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” S. 6, l. 175