Grieving by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

The essay Grieving, by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, details a form of grief that occurs when one’s passion is lost. Durham has been the Journalism professor at the University of Iowa since 2000 amongst other credentials. She revolves the essay around her profession as Durham’s husband recently lost his tenure, and therefore couldn’t continue as a professor. Durham and her husband had worked at the same university, both as professors. For this profession she lacks a passion for which her husband possessed. His passion for this profession was so profound; he went into a period of grief. Greif not only impacted Dallas and his wife, Durham, but rather their children as well. Within the essay, Durham attempts to grasp the grief her husband experiences. Durham aims her writing towards anyone struggling or knows someone struggling with grief. Durham uses rhetoric, logos and pathos, to analyze how a job one is passionate about can impact a persons being. As she appeals to the readers’ logic, logos, she uses physical evidence as proof that the loss of Dallas’ passion is affecting him. The narrator tells the readers, “…[H]ow white his lips were, how his hands were shaking” (Durham, 59) these physical attributes revealed that the severe emotional aftermath of his failure to obtain tenure was so extreme, that it became physically evident in his demeanor.  Durham uses diction to appeal to pathos: the emotions of the reader. The narrator expresses Dallas’ feelings, “‘I wake up wanting it to be a dream’ he told me on many bleak mornings.” The use of emotion assists the readers in connecting and feeling empathy towards him. Through her use of diction, communicating emotion logically and creating empathy, Durham is able to show how deeply passion may affect a person and thus succeeds in achieving her purpose.

One Cannot Feel What Another Feels, But They Can Imagine
Franz Schuber
http://farahaffinity.blogspot.com/2011/11/grief.html