The Memory Keepers Daughter post 2 by Kim Edwards

Too many mournful yesterdays,
Have put my anticipating tomorrows in doubt.
Crying in tears of shameless regret,
The future lies in a shadow of doubt.

Inside I want to watch the new sun rise,
Yet I can only breath beneath the moon.
Maybe one day I can step outside of the shadows,
That leaves my soul sheltered in a cocoon. 


This is a poem by an anonymous author online, I picked this poem to relate to my book because it is about regret and pain which is all the feelings that is mixed into their lives. David henry gave away his daughter and all these years the memory of that night has haunted him, his wife norah starts to regret every aspect of her life-her marriage her childhood, never getting to hold her daughter, and paul regrets never being closer to his dad and his mom; who I think was most affected by pain and regret, was the one person that was able to escape from everything and start anew-Caroline gills the one that took Pheobe and raised her away from everyone. I think the reason that she is most affected is that what could have happened is poisoning her always. she dreams in fantasies and in what ifs never living for the moment and processing what is really happening. when she wakes up from this dreamy sleep and finally looks at what has happened and who's child exactly she is raising, then regret will riddle her life and poison her slowly from the inside just like it did  to  the Henry's, except this time it is going to hit all at once all these memories that she has let drift by will come rushing back to hurt her, she started this pain when she took the baby in the car and drove off to her new life,she may not have caused it but she started it and this is a continuous cycle that once started can never end.
to me this poem means that what happens yesterday has poisoned tomorrow or affected everyday after, that this regret over shadows them keeping them in the darkness of tears and pain, and that one day this person hopes that they can leave this pain behind, and start a new life away from tears and depression. I believe that this is what all the characters in this book strive to accomplish as well,they want to leave this invisible wall keeping them back,they want to leave the pain that haunts them all that dont even know exists. The wish to live to live like they always dreamed, a suburban family playing in the sun, but even when the sun shines the brightest it can never touch them.

The Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards

In this book the father delivers his wife’s two babies at a hospital, but upon seeing that his daughter has down syndrome, he tells the nurse that is working to take the baby away from him and his wife and never speak to his wife about it. He planned to lie and tell his wife that his baby daughter died at the birth. I believe that the author named the book "The Memory Keepers Daughter", because he keeps all of these secrets about his little girl and begins to see as these forbidden memories inside his head and lingering ones in his wife’s tear his family apart.

I think that the thing that is really overwhelming her is not only the grief that she never really got to see her daughter but the fact that she knows somewhere inside of her that her daughter did live. When the dad hit the baby back it cried out as it took its first startling breath, I think that somewhere deep within her sleepy state the wife heard that cry and made her first connection with the baby, listened and somehow registered the first sound her little baby made. That is why I think in all her dreams she is looking for something she lost- she is not grieving over memories she was never able to have- she is tortured by the ones she did.

I also believe that the father is not really upset about his wife, or even the fact that his only son has to be raised by him alone without the help of the mother I think he is so upset over the rash decision he made to throw the precious daughter he could have had that he chose to throw away. My opinion is that he should be the one that is having the dreams of lost things, because to have to lose something you have to be able to posses it first, and though technically the wife did have the baby carried inside her as part of her body, the dad held her in his hands looked over her face, saw her and took her in as part of this world and then in a split second rejected her as ever being there. To me the way he lost something is his sense of reality- because in those few moments the world and time just didn’t exist as she disappeared from his arms. The most haunting thing about this is that no matter where he goes she could a step, a mile, a universe away, and yet the fact that she is hi, that he first one to look at her, to hold her, to know her as phoebe. Again this brings me back to memories and how for his situation the actual reality is much different- in fact the opposite from the wife’s- that though he shred these few tender moments, he is more upset over all the years he lost when he left her. 

To conclude the wife, and the father have had the reality of their states of mind completely wrong and confused and that memories are the most dangerous thing to enter a human’s fragile mind.

Ash by Malinda Lo

In this book there is a girl named Aislinn who is referred to as ash. In the beginning of the story it explains how her mother died, though ash was grief ridden she had the shoulders of her father to lean on, and his arms to run into when she cried- but then her father died as well. Previous to the death her father had remarried to a cruel woman with two daughters, so when he passed on ash was left with these sad remains of a “family”, and was eventually forced to move from her home she had lived in since birth and adapt to the royal city life. In past books and from real life experiences I often saw that when people went through traumatizing events or lost something that they loved and that was very important to them, they took another look at their life- at the people around them and at the world itself, this loss led them to reassess themselves and change for better. But in this story Ash does not do a 360 and look again at the aspects of her life, she turns to fairytales, stories, and legends that she can follow aimlessly and forget the pain. I believe that all the hurt that ash has been through only made her flee to a dream state, and not brought her to terms with reality.

One example of this is when she meets the fairy Sidhean. All her life by her mom, her caretaker, and the entire town, she had been told to never trust a fairy- to never sip from their cup- to never follow the fairy hunters or step into the fairy ring. But all of a sudden she stumbles upon Sidhean and instead of turning away and running she goes closer- and began looking for him every night, going as far as to wander the forest alone on cold nights in unfamiliar places searching for the danger she had always been told to run from. I think ash does this because since she has lost so much of the reality around her she must feel like she is gripping with her fingernails onto the last bit she knows is still there: herself. She looks for danger because she wants to be hurt, she wants to feel an emotion again, to feel movement within her so that she knows she is not just a simple presence but a being that lives and breathes. I think she cannot feel as strongly as before because all the pain swallowed her long ago, she drowned in the hurt until she couldn’t tell the difference between this pain and all the feelings she once had, so she is searching for reassurance.

Another example of this is how she searches desperately for love in everyone. Even though her step mother treats her no better than any other servant or maid, ash still insists on doing everything she can to please both her mother and her sisters. Also when she meets the huntress she becomes almost immediately possessive and desperate for the huntress to show affection love and care back to her- this desperation also appears in her a Sidhean it is another reason she went chasing after him, in search of someone to show an interest in her no matter what kind.

This connects to the world because it shows how while a lot of people will face the pain head on and embrace it and slowly work through it, others will live in a world of shadows hiding In the corners of denial and refusing to come out from their shelter and face the storm. They will wander around in search of something that they feel they have lost, when really the emptiness they feel is really the cut in their heart that they never gave a chance to heal- that they just ignored and left gaping open. This kind of thing I believe will lead people to do irrational things. An example of this is 9/11 when so many people lost their loved ones and had to see the scene repeated on news broadcasts and in pictures scattered around the world;  some chose not to accept this loss and slowly start to get better but to turn around and blame others, to distract their minds  from all the pain. It was incidents like this that made discrimination against Muslims so prominent. It is not anyone’s fault that these things happen; it’s just the fragile state of the human mind that is often overestimated in its strength.