There is no protection, unless it is in knowing.
Uncle Craig’s death was Dell’s first close encounter with people’s death. To understand it, she started attacking her mother with the variety of questions. The questioning lasted for such a long period of time that Dell noticed how her “cold appetite for details” irritated her mother. She “followed her around the house, scowling, persistent, repeating her questions”. She didn’t do it because of pure curiosity, Dell really “wanted to know”, for there was no protection from death, “unless it was in knowing”. She wanted “death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances”. Dell wanted to know that she was safe.
You have to learn to face things sometime.
Ada wasn’t that type of a mother, who was ready to do everything possible to protect her children from harshness of reality. On the contrary, she wanted her daughter to know what a life really was, she wanted her not to be narrow-minded. She usually said, “you have to learn to face things sometimes”, which meant that she was preparing her children for a real life. Her words seemed to have a different effect. Ada’s “briskness and zeal seemed dales and vulgar” to Dell. She believed that her mother was hurry her “mater-of-factly towards whatever pain or obscenity or unwelcome revelation” which was laid out for her.
Maybe you could learn to copy his way.
The youth is often criticized by their parents and grandparents for not wanting to follow their examples and listening to their advice. Of course, it is not always like that, but Dell is not that lucky. Her aunties Grace and Elspeth used to adore Craig, they thought of him as an extremely gifted writer, whose work shouldn’t vanish from the face of the Earth. In spite of the fact that they knew that Dell could write very well and had her own style, they hoped that she “could learn to copy his way” and continue his work. They couldn’t believe that Dell would be able to put her own wishes higher than ones of her family. According to them, she was too young and too inexperienced to create something that good, not to mention that she was a female.
