Tag Archives: ann napolitano

I was part of the last cohort of students in Ontario to take OAC’s (or grade 13). It meant five years of high school instead of four (though *cough* *humble brag* I still did the five years in four years) and included a suite of ‘advanced’ courses that were intended to prepare you for University. Courses like “World Issues,” and “Writers Craft” and “Super Fancy Latin.” One of my favourites was “Philosophy,” which managed to cram into a semester the entire canon of Western philosophy. Sort of. The teacher, Mr. Morrison, was cantankerous and brilliant. He taught me how to write a good essay (or good enough for first year University instructors to be impressed, anyway) and how to purposefully swear. Of the lessons he taught though, the one I keep coming back to – probably in an already oversimplified and misremembered way -, is the one on existentialism. I remember him banging away on the idea that to face the void of existence we have to either ‘destroy something’ or ‘create something,’ and (implied) our imperative as we set out into the world was to find something worthy of our acts of intentional creation. That we wouldn’t find meaning in God or the state, but we might just find it in art. Twenty-odd years later I recognize Mr. Morrison’s lecture wasn’t earth shattering, but it was… significant to me at the time, and something I continue to return to all these years later.

So when it was Mr. Morrison I thought of after reading Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward. The premise is simple: titular young boy, Edward, is the sole survivor of a giant plane crash where 191 other people die, including his parents and older brother. How does this person (hard to call him a child after surviving such an event) make a meaningful life? How does he make sense of his survival (how do others make sense of it, and how does he navigate their efforts to force meaning on him)? How can he reconcile his sense of loss with the losses of those around him – can such things ever be compared? (and why do we bother comparing grief?) [The best example of this in the book is in comparing Edward to his aunt who adopts him. She has had multiple miscarriages and her sister has died, surely, the book asks, her grief is Significant? But nothing, it seems, touches the loss for Edward. In part because he is made to stand in for all 191 others who died and asked to be for them in life what they might have been.]

Through years we watch Edward develop relationships with his aunt and uncle, with the girl next door, with his therapist and with his teachers. We see him do something like ‘come to terms’ with his trauma, by doing as Mr. Morrison-by-way-of-philosophy advises: creating. He figures out that he won’t ‘get over’ his trauma, rather he will create himself anew. And as he does that he comes in to millions – millions and millions – and sees a way forward through giving others the chance to create what they want through Money.

Which let me just say the answer in this book slips precariously close to ‘money is the answer,’ but pulls it back, I think, to ‘community’ is the answer (which my bleeding Unitarian heart can’t help but nod vigorously at while I’m reading), and yes, ‘creation.’ So Mr. Morrison, if, somehow, you are reading this: thanks for teaching me all that you did. And if you need a new book to assign (if you’re still teaching), maybe you could do Dear Edward or maybe just, you know, keep doing you.