Philosofamily Book: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

        Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is a touching story about a boy named Oskar who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th 2001. As Oskar continues on throughout his life, he is having trouble getting over his father's death which is understandable. And Oskar begins to do everything that he can to still hold on to a little piece of his father. This raises the question: is it ethical to move on after someone you care about dies?

      When someone dies there are 5 stages of loss and grief. The first stage is denial and isolation when you refuse to accept that something like this could happen and you hide yourself from the rest of the world. The second stage is anger, this is when you begin to take out your frustrations on everything around you and you feel that what happened was unfair and it makes you hate everything. The third stage is bargaining and this is when you begin to think of the "what ifs" and you make promises to the world in exchange for what you want. The fourth stage is depression, and this is the stage where everything falls apart and it is impossible to be happy or to have anything make your life good. The final step is acceptance. People can look at acceptance in many different ways, they can see it as you realizing that all the other stages were irrational, or that you find that you want to move on. But moving on does not have to be the same thing as forgetting someone or something that happened. It just means that it is you not wanting to deny, be angry, bargain, or be depressed anymore. For example, for the people who died on September 11th like Oskar's father, we had our time that we were going through the stages of grief, but now people have continued to live out their lives and continued to be happy, but this doesn't meant that the people who died were forgotten, we still honor them and remember them in our hearts and we honor them every year on September 11th.

        So although this can still be challenged, I think that it is ethical to move on after suffering a loss because it allows you to be happy and you still remember what you are moving on from, because what you are really moving on from is not the person who passed, but the stages of grief that caused you pain. So in this sense, I believe that Oskar should be able to move on after his father's death, and so should anyone who suffers a loss.