Losing someone you love deeply can cause all kinds of difficult emotions. Grief is usually the natural response to loss. It’s the emotional suffering when someone you never expected will be lost forever was taken away from you. In the novel Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart and the movie, Birdsong based from the novel by Sebastian Faulks, the protagonist both undergo grief during the Great War. Through all these sorrows, they both have similar ways to cope with their undergoing emotions. In coping with their repressed feelings, they need someone to open up their past and their wounds. When Eamon was declared missing in action at war, Klara Becker tried to hide her grief by isolation away from the society, ignoring every little being that …show more content…
In coping up with their own loss, both Klara and Stephen are remembering all the recollections to get over their own past and to move on in the present. Klara carved Eamon’s face on the statue of the torch bearer, as one way of forgetting him through remembering him. “Once she began to work on the untouched side of the face, she remembered the pure joy of making art, how the self connected with the emerging form” (Urquhart. 334). This passage also talks about reoccurring to carving after 30 years of no contact with the chisels and other carving tools. Returning to the one hobby she had also loved, letting go of what she must did. In these ways, Stephen also experienced remembering an exact moment in the past to forget it in the present. In the movie, Stephen and Jack are stuck in the tunnel, talking about the lives of the people they will leave if they will never get out of there. Stephen then recalls a memory where she visits Isabelle’s sister, and saw her very own child – the reason why Isabelle left her without any doubt. Through reminiscing the moment when she saw her very own child, he left Isabelle’s memory behind in the past and focusing on the future happenings as a father. Thus, his motivation for survival is changing from Isabelle to his own daughter. Throughout the two novels, the characters are portrayed different forms of grieving, but in the similar way of coping with it. It