Overview: A great deal of people today have inadequate coping mechanisms when it comes to the gloomy and spooky subject of human mortality. After all, unlike in ancient times, people did not especially get all that shocked, since they lived with frequent episodes of war, famine, plague, or natural disasters—death was very common.

Now that we are adults, we do not have the sometimes blissful naivete of children, but at the same time, we do not have the blind illusion that sometimes children have, that the person we love can come back at any instant (after all, doesn't Kenny come back to life during the next episode of South Park?)

Even if we are adults, this does not imply that we still have adequate coping mechanisms to handle the death of a relationship, the death of someone close to us—any sort of trauma that may drop into our lives at a moment's notice. That is the purpose of this mini-narrative: to identify, describe, and analyze a memory you had regarding someone else's death and how you coped with it. This subject is definitely an easy one and it is probably a very private one, but people often find writing about this topic relatively cathartic.

Assignment Tasks:

1. Identify a situation in your life where ALL of your coping mechanisms, both positive and negative, were employed due to the loss of someone close to you (I will accept narratives in which you depict the ending of a relationship, because sometimes that also feels like you've lost that person).