I\u2019m not sure what kinds of feelings are felt after a parents\u2019 death and I can\u2019t ever try and pretend to channel what those feelings might entail. When thinking about Bechdel and her recollection of her father\u2019s life, and the life that they shared, I am still left with the idea that Bechdel has, like me, many questions that are still unanswered. Questions pertaining to her father\u2019s sexual orientation, whether or not the allegations of sexual abuse to a minor were true, and if he was, even to say, happy. However I am making the claim that it is within those unanswered questions that Bechdel was able to navigate her own identity, while still struggling with that fact that she never honestly knew his identity. It is his death that brings about this complexity, this speculative persona that she didn\u2019t think to expect from herself. Bechdel does not know how to interpret her father\u2019s death, \u201cWhat\u2019s lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself\u201d (Bechdel, 120). In this scene that Bechdel says this, she is looking through a box filled with old pictures and in that box she sees a picture that stands out: a photo of her father in a woman\u2019s bathing suit. Bechdel had the question of why, but ends with her statement that \u201che\u2019s lissome, elegant\u201d (Bechdel, 120). It is as though Bechdel is letting her father exist as himself without feeling the need to identify him. The idea of being \u201clost in translation\u201d is Bechdel\u2019s outcry to deconstruct her feelings of grief toward her father\u2019s death. The \u201ccomplexity of loss itself\u201d is the grief. How is Bechdel supposed to interpret her father\u2019s death, when she knew almost nothing about him, as he was barely nurturing and only took interest in Bechdel once she was in college. What does it mean to lose someone who barely revealed a persona of themselves that had encapsulated most of his adult life? \u201cLost,\u201d meaning \u201cno\u00a0longer\u00a0to\u00a0be\u00a0found,\u201d (Dictionary.com) is Betchdel\u2019s inadequacy to find her place on the spectrum of grief, as she is no longer able to see herself as being a griever but sees herself \u201clost in translation.\u201d \u201cLost in the translation\u201d over her father\u2019s identity, \u201clost in the translation\u201d over her father\u2019s absence of emotion, and \u201clost in the translation\u201d over her inability to fully accept that her father was gone. To see someone as tangible, is the idea that their physical presence exists among you. In the scenes that we see leading up to her father\u2019s death, there is a connection starting to form, although slow, and the tangibility of them being together gave the father a sort of contentment. The tangibility is then lost with his death, and it is in that loss that Bechdel begins to find herself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bechdel, Alison.\u00a0Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic<\/em>. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.<\/p>\n Lost [Def. 2]. (n.d) in Dictionary.com<\/em>, Retrived: April 26, 2016,<\/p>\n from http:\/\/www.dictionary.com\/browse\/lost?s=t<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m not sure what kinds of feelings are felt after a parents\u2019 death and I can\u2019t ever try and pretend to channel what those feelings might entail. When thinking about Bechdel and her recollection of her father\u2019s life, and the life that they shared, I am still left with the idea that Bechdel has, like … Continue reading At a loss for…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3014,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3014"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}