Grief and Healing Theme Analysis

The main characters in “Secrets” process their grief by compartmentalizing their emotions. While this response perhaps helps them survive in the short term, the story suggests that in order to properly heal from their trauma, the characters must allow themselves to truly feel their grief. All three of the story’s major characters deal with grief by compartmentalizing and “freezing” their emotions. The story opens with the protagonist grieving the imminent death of his Great Aunt Mary, “trembling with anger or sorrow [...] waiting for something to happen.” This passage describes the protagonist’s distance from his emotions—he can’t tell whether he feels sorrow or anger—as well as his suspension in time, as he “waits,” “trembling” as if frozen, removed from the scene of Mary’s death. When the story flashes back to the protagonist’s childhood, a similar response to grief is evident in Aunt Mary’s character. The reader learns that Aunt Mary has spent much of her life grieving the loss of her former lover, John, who was so traumatized by fighting in World War I that he became a Catholic monk named Brother Benignus. Like the protagonist, Aunt Mary also distances herself from her emotions by compartmentalizing them, refusing to let herself be vulnerable with anyone, including the protagonist. And by locking John’s letters in her highly organized bureau-bookcase, Aunt Mary very literally compartmentalizes the source of her grief. Finally, in his wartime letters to Aunt Mary, John describes his grief from the trauma of war, saying, “I have lost all sense of feeling” and worrying about what will happen to the dead bodies around him “when the thaw comes.” Like Mary and the protagonist, John’s immense grief freezes him, making him unable to feel anything but anger.

Because they are emotionally closed-off and numb, all three characters are able to endure their trauma in the short term. But Mary’s emotional outburst when the protagonist betrays her trust demonstrates the long-term cost of not processing grief. Because she has only locked her emotions away, Aunt Mary transfers her unprocessed anger from John’s betrayal to the protagonist, whose childish actions are hurtful but arguably do not merit such an intense response. Thus, the rigidity of being emotionally frozen causes her to hurt the people she loves, and she never moves on from her grief. By contrast, in becoming Brother Benignus, John is able to feel his grief and make meaning from it. As he writes to Aunt Mary, “Christ has spoken to me through the carnage,” demonstrating that although the horrors of war still haunt him, by facing his grief and processing it through his religion, he has begun to heal. The protagonist’s tears at the end of the story similarly demonstrate his ability to process his grief over Mary’s death. Although he never gets the closure of Mary’s forgiveness, by crying “for the first time since she had died,” the protagonist finds a sense of release, taking the first step toward healing. The story therefore suggests that in order to truly heal from trauma, we must first “thaw” our emotions and face our grief.