In the story A Sorrowful Woman by Gail Godwin you have family: wife, husband, and son. What makes this family different is that the mother is very mentally ill, she progresses and becomes worse and worse until the point she dies. She dies from mental exhaustion. When her body is discovered the young son’s response is “Can we eat the Turkey for supper? (Godwin 43) When I first read that I thought, “What a strange and emotionless response especially from a child.”. Most children would have cried, asked “Is mommy going to wake up? Is she okay?”. Maybe a normal child would have run over and thrown their body on their mothers, similar to what the husband did. “The father put down his face into her fresh-washed hair” (Godwin43); clearly he was grieving. The son on the other hand just wanted to know about dinner. He displayed no sense of what had just happened to his mother, or that he was never going to see again. He saw probably her as the-woman-he-calls-mom-and-lives-in-a-room-by-herself-who-he-used-to-see-at-bedtime. I believe the son acted this way because of the extremely distant relationship he shared with her. He never played with his mother, he only said goodnight and before she was shown pictures he made. He did not give the pictures to her himself, if he did it cause her too much anxiety (Godwin 40). Even just seeing him play from a window with his father or nanny set her off into mental instability (Godwin42). He was pushed so far away from his mother because of her mental illness, but a child cannot understand this, let alone know what it means. He was told “mommy is sick” and “mommy is tired” (Godwin 40 &41). So being a good boy, he did as a he was told, left her alone, and played. The illness got so bad that one night, through no fault of his own, the mother told the father “I don’t think I can see him anymore” (Godwin 42) shortly after