Part A – “…Divorced, Beheaded, Survived”
”…Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” by Robin Black is a story about an average American family, with two generations losing someone close to them. The first person narrator is the mother of the family who lost Terry, her older brother, at a very young age. The story is partly told in flashbacks from the last summer with her brother and the neighbor’s kids playing in their backyard while reenacting the death of Henry VIII’s wives. The present part of the story describes how the unnamed narrator’s oldest son, Mark, has a friend that suddenly passes away in a car accident. The story draws parallels between the death of Terry and the death of Mark’s friend and how both deaths play a role in their ordinary family life.
Losing someone as close to you as a brother, has inevitably affected the life of the narrator. She reveals how it has caused superstition “Mark and Coco are four years apart – we had been two apart, Terry and I. And maybe it was superstition that made me wait that extra stretch of time before getting pregnant again”. It has also caused drastic changes to her friendship with the neighbors whom she had spent countless hours in their backyard, reenacting the death of Henry VIII’s wives. “We weren’t really friends, anymore. And neither of us said a word to the other, not a single word.” It is here very clear how the friendship between the two girls were lost in high school. Though it’s very commonly seen that childhood friends lose touch when they get older, and especially when they reach high school, it’s hinted that it may be because of Terry’s death. Terry was described as being the most entertaining when reenacting and he passing away is highly likely the reason they stopped playing. The reenactment was the key to their friendship. If he had not passed away they would have continued to play together and their friendship may have continued until high school.
The lost friendship with Molly symbolizes the change that could occur in many relationships and friendships after the loss of a loved one. A similar situation is shown when Marks loses his friend Peter. Losing a friend or a loved one is never easy, but it’s inevitable and people react very differently. Mark isolates himself from his friends and surroundings. It’s not revealed how the narrator reacted to the death of her brother, but it may have been similar to Mark’s reaction, given that she loses touch with many of her neighborhood friends. It must have been a very strong reaction with feelings like misery and unjustified loss. But the feelings are not very clear in the text. Generally the narrator doesn’t show a lot of emotion, due to the lack of adjectives it’s hard to interpret, but it’s very clear that both deaths affect her.

Divorced, beheaded, survived is a part of the rhyme “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” which is used to remember the fates of King Henry VIII’s six wives, which is part of European history that is part of many tenth graders curriculum. The teacher writes the well-known rhyme on the board “while Molly Denham and I dutifully copied it into our notebooks, as though we might otherwise forget.” There is a lot of sarcasm in this, given that they have heard and said the thyme countless times when they were kids that it would be highly unlikely that they would ever forget. Just like that summer, even though none of them acknowledges it they would never forget. It’s exactly the same with death, after a while it will drift into the background and life will carry on, but it will never be forgotten. The narrator mentions this: “they know about him without my ever having had to tell either of them. Uncle Terry, he would have been. It’s family information. The kind that travels in the air that children breathe.”
The lost friendship with Molly symbolizes the change that could occur in many relationships and friendships after the loss of a loved one. A similar situation is shown when Marks loses Peter, but here the roles may be switched. Peter may have been like a brother to Mark, and in that case the loss may affect Mark more than his surroundings and he would play the role of that his mother did many years before. If Mark had a more distant relationship with Peter, he would be playing the role that Molly was many years ago. Mark would slowly lose touch with Peter’s family and siblings (though it’s not said whether or not he has any).
The narrator has accepted the death of her brother, and hereby accepting death as a part of life and the human cycle “The truth is that sometimes even more than a day goes by before I remember to think of my brother. It’s only natural, I’ve told myself, time and time again. It’s human nature”. And she is now willing to pass on the knowledge that she has discovered through bitter experience “’it was hard’ I said to Mark, as he lifted the picture toward his face. ‘ There is no secret answer. It was terribly, terribly hard’”.

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