Life Breaking Down: Keiski and Walker Battle Debilitation - Essay Example

Keiski confronts a terrible injury when her friend Sue attempts a suicide. She says, “Intense grief, still masked by shock, flooded over me” (94). The sorrow and pain she felt of what she might have done to prevent her friend’s attempt to commit a suicide made Keiski’s life miserable. That agony was so overwhelming that it disrupted her life. After Sue was taken to the hospital, Keiski’s feeling of guiltiness worsened, almost making her commit suicide herself. In addition to causing terrible pain, Sue’s attempted suicide was so unexpected that it even overcame Keiski’s extreme desolation.

That astonishment helped Keiski hide her feelings, which, in turn, allowed all her bad feelings to gather inside her, causing even more pain. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to release hidden feelings. They tend to gather inside a person and at some point, the person gets overwhelmed by those feelings. That makes that person’s life unbearable. This buried pain caused Keiski depression. These concealed feelings made the trauma that Keiski will have to cope with. Walker, like Keiski, describes her injury.

Walker talks about watching a tree as the sight leaves her injured eye: “I watch as its trunk, its branches, and then its leaves are blotted out by the rising blood” (384). It is a horrible injury for a person to lose eyesight. However, the fact that Walker can see how she lost her eyesight makes her injury worse. It is just too painful to witness how your own life debilitates. Sometimes, the process of seeing oneself getting injured causes a trauma itself. Walker was able to see how her visual field dimmed: at first she was able to see big objects, then smaller and smaller.

This shows a trend that will continue until a person loses his vision. Seeing this, Walker understands that soon the red substance will be covering her whole eye and that she would not be able to see that tree anymore. People in similar situations get so overwhelmed that they cannot do anything. Walker’s shock of observing how the blood covers her eye and how her eyesight dimmed initially impeded her from coping with the injury. Keiski does not only talk about her injury, but also describes the treatment.

She describes her visit to the doctor as follows, “She forced me to start thinking about myself and how I was handling the situation instead of just how Sue was doing” (96). Even though Keiski visited the psychologist on the next day after the tragedy, her situation was so bad that the doctor had to make her follow his advice. He explained to Keiski that in order to deal with her trauma, she needs to think more about herself. Otherwise, thinking more about her friend would worsen her current condition.

Doctor thought that obliging Keiski to care about herself more than about other people, especially Sue, would allow her to concentrate on her own problems and help her forget about the incident. Also, the doctor made it clear that Sue was not the only person who has changed lives because of her suicide attempt. According to him, Keiski had problems too. So, instead of trying to help Sue with her problems, Keiski should solve her own problem because a person who has problem cannot help others who have more serious burden than her.

Doctor saw Keiski’s treatment in paying less attention to what was going on with Sue, because the care about her friend that Keiski expressed did not allow her to forget about the