Jill's Life is Always Changing...
Have you ever felt so tired of life and how your fate never ends up to be what you want? Do you ever wish to have a life filled with no worries? A perfect life? An adventurous life? Or maybe your dream life? People of different ages all around the world have dreams, wishes, and thoughts that never or sometimes luckily come true. Some people have a life that change from time to time; sometimes negatively and sometimes positively, therefore it is impossible for a person to have a perfect life. As human beings we have many ups and downs in our lives. To earn something, we have to do something; that is how life works. The ups we face in our lives are our achievements and the downs we face in our lives are our problems we face. However, problems are not always seen as a negative thing because once we reach the solution, or the end of it, we learn something new. After we learn the lesson, we apply it to our life so that we won't make the same mistake or have the same problem again. This is how we change. At one point of our lives, we had to deal with change. Changing can mean going from a child to an adult, or losing someone important in our life. Changes can also mean dealing with loss, bullying, and getting something taken away from you. Changing means to make or become different, to have a life change so drastically and only within one moment, which is the case with most people. Furthermore, no matter how painful or how joyful we become after getting through a traumatic situation, and no matter how much our heart pleads to go back to the past and change a specific moment, that one event will definitely change us no matter what.
"How To Save A Life" by Sara Zarr is an amazing book that many people can connect to. It is about a young teenager named Jill MacSweeny and how she goes through many problems. She copes through each one but one major things that she briefly mentions is that she is afraid of change. After getting so used to an ordinary life style with her friends and family, she does not think about a life without the important person that completed her life: her dad. Her dad dies in an accident and ever since, her life takes a huge twist. However, at the end of her pain and struggles, she learns how to cope with loss and many other situations that she faces without her dad.
Losing someone can be very painful; not physically, but emotionally. Sometimes it can hurt so much that people forget how to live. Jill MacSweeny noticed the importance of her dad only after he died. He was the only person who taught her to be confident, and the only person who gave her confidence. On page three, Jill said, "There's no other explanation for my presence. Sometimes it's like I exist - keep going to school, keep coming home, keep showing up in my life- only to prove that his confidence in me, his affection for me, weren't mistakes. That I'm the person he always said I was. Am. That I know the right things to do and will always do them in the end, even if it takes me a while to get there and even if I fight the whole way." Evidently, Jill is getting emotional about her father's death. She even corrected herself in saying that she still "is" the person when her dad was alive. She is having a hard time accepting that her father is dead. Moreover, her inspired and open mind change into something overwhelmed and rejected by life. Everything turned from optimistic to pessimistic and dark. For example, on page three to four, she said, "But let me tell you: It's epically, stupidly, monumentally hard. Hard to deal with people who are only trying to be nice , comforting. hard to not hate all my friends who still have their dads. Hard to smile and say "thank you to all random strangers I deal with in a day who don't know any better than to act as if the world is a good place." Jill's point of view of the world is something bitter and she describes it as a place where no one would want to live after. Before her dad died, she used to look at the positives of life, but now she is judging life based on the negative point of view.
Clearly, this tragic event changed Jill's behavior dramatically, She is struggling with her life and is trying to find the person who she was when her father was alive. Beyond her father's death, however Jill is not seeing the path to a whole different world, without her dad that is. She is seeing her dad's death as the worst thing possible. Jill is not noticing the fact that it gave her an opportunity to change, or a an opportunity to look beyond the surface of the world without a helping hand. To connect to our world, looking for a positive side to someone's death is quite unusual and it it is not something a person would try to do. As unusual as it is, Jill's mother, Robin, has the mind of hope and tried to look for a positive for her husband's death.
Robin is a mother full of crazy ideas. She was planning to adopt a baby. Jill did not approve her decision. Although she wants thing to go back to normal, she didn't like the idea of someone replacing her dad. In any way, Robin finalized her decision for the adoption, which changed Jill's behavior. Jill started to show little or no care toward many things. For example, she started to ignore her friends and family, and she didn't care about her grades in school. Moreover, the mother of the baby that Robin is adopting, Mandy, came over to to Jill's house. After she asked for a few pillows, Jill gave her an attitude and "stomped" away. The word "stomped" shows how little she cared about Mandy's comfort.
To add on, on page ten, Robin said, "It feels right. A death, and now a life." Unlike Jill, her mother now sees the world as something interesting and something to look into. Adopting a baby would distract her from her husband. She kept making excuses to Jill for why she actually wants the baby. On page nine, she said "Seeing good things as impossible is exactly what's wrong with our world." She also cut her hair which Jill's father always thought as beautiful. It seems to be that Robin wants a change and is trying to get rid of things that Jill's father left behind. One thing she has in common with Jill is that her change was dramatic as well. Instead of grieving over her husband, she did the total opposite. She was acting overly optimistic, which is considered weird. Her husband's death shaped Robin into a provocative person who looks into the world for reasons to live.
After shutting her friends out, Jill became very lonely. Her boyfriend, Dylan, tried to talk to her many times. Finally, after he did talk to her, his behavior changed. For example, when they met in the restaurant, he was much more distant than he was before. His provoking attitude created an argument between them. Instead of showing sympathy for the many things that Jill was going through, he did not give her sympathy, which was a negative change. However, at other times Dylan acts like the best person ever by showing Jill that he still cares for her. Somehow Jill's dad's death changed Dylan into a better person as well. He became more comforting and friendly. He hugged Jill and comforted her when she cried. Everyone makes mistakes because no one is perfect. Something as small as a moment can change someone's behavior completely like it did to Dylan. Everyone has a positive and a negative side. An event does not necessarily have to change a person into a totally good person or a totally bad person. It can change someone partially.
Without noticing it, Jill was changing after her dad died. She started to realize more things. On page 92, she said, "...I thought maybe I didn't really love him until he was gone. And that made me wonder whether love is possible, because I know my dad loved me and loved my mom. What I don't understand is how he learned to do that so well and what I'm going to do now that he's not here to show me." In other words, Jill is figuring everything out and realized that she does not know how to love without her dad to show her. On page, 91, she said, "Shouldn't love have to at least a little to do with the other person, separate from yourself...And I get to thinking that love is a word we use to describe what boils down to a selfish and temporary state of mind." Although Jill was impacted very negatively by her dad's death, it also changed the way she viewed the world. She is a much deeper person and is trying to find the meaning of complicated ideas such as love. Although she thinks that she cannot do anything without her dad, she doesn't know that she has the capability of doing almost anything in her interest. This is a positive change because she is learning a deep secret of life. Everyone has a different meaning of love. Jill's meaning is that in order for a person to love someone else, it has to be real, and not temporarily. Loving someone mans to care for that person and having the strength to sacrifice for him/her. If you love someone, and you mean it, then you won't regret it in the future.
As can be seen, an event can change a person in many ways. Anything, even a moment, can change the way a person thinks and does things. Jill learned many things throughout this book, especially the fact that you have to love someone in the present to not regret it later on. She explored the world by thinking deeper than usual. Moreover, other people can connect to this book in many ways because it shows the phases of losing someone and it can teach people how to cope through the phases.
