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Symbols
Judith Templeton’s textbook is a symbol of bureaucratic incompetence and the lack of emotion that many governments show when dealing with human loss. On a personal level, the textbook embodies Judith’s insensitivity and her inability to truly empathize with people who have experienced profound tragedy. More broadly, though, it also symbolizes a sterile and overly programmatic bureaucratic approach to grief—an approach that relies on schematics and carefully charted stages of grief while ignoring the humanity of the people who are actually dealing with the agonizing consequences of such a harrowing loss. Judith’s textbook is juxtaposed with the real-life, lived experiences of grief that Shaila Bhave, Kusum, Dr. Ranganathan, and the elderly couple all experience. Those characters' experiences of grief are all shown to be deeply personal, varied, messy, and impossible to predict, ultimately illustrating how ineffective a procedural textbook is when it comes to addressing the many difficulties of true loss and sorrow.
Judith Templeton’s Textbook Quotes in The Management of Grief
The The Management of Grief quotes below all refer to the symbol of Judith Templeton’s Textbook. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Management of Grief
Quotes
“Nothing I can do will make any difference,” I say. “We must all grieve in our own way.”
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“In the textbooks on grief management,” [Judith] replies—I am her confidante, I realize, one of the few whose grief has not sprung bizarre obsessions—“there are stages to pass through: rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction.” She has compiled a chart and finds that six months after the tragedy, none of us still reject reality, but only a handful are reconstructing. “Depressed Acceptance” is the plateau we’ve reached.
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Judith Templeton’s Textbook Symbol Timeline in The Management of Grief
The timeline below shows where the symbol Judith Templeton’s Textbook appears in The Management of Grief. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The Management of Grief
...still “hysterical” and shares with Shaila the steps of grief that she has learned from textbooks on “grief management”: rejection, depression, acceptance, and reconstruction. Six months after the tragedy, only a...
(full context)
