I went to my first funeral when I was 15. Not for a grandparent, great-uncle or elderly family friend, but for a girl my age. Tammy had been hit by a car walking home from school one day. She never made it home.
Tammy wasn’t a close friend, but we’d been friendly. Tammy had been one of those quiet, shy, reserved kids, who kept her head down and, yes, maybe was considered odd by the rest of us. I think she would have been surprised at the number of people who attended her funeral.
But a lot of us did show up because, like me, a lot of us had never experienced the sudden death of someone we knew. It was strange and disorienting. Awkward. Uncomfortable. What did we say to Tammy’s parents? What did we say to each other?
My friend Tracey and I approached Tammy’s closed casket together. We paid our respects, though we weren’t quite sure what that actually meant. We stood in front of the closed casket, staring at it.
Then Tracey leaned into me and whispered, “Which way do you think her head is?”
I couldn’t stifle my laugh. Tracey’s comment and my reaction were perhaps insensitive and inappropriate, but it’s what we thought. I’d shake my head later at our behaviour, but honestly, we didn’t know how else to break the tension.
We didn’t know how to cope with the strange grief we were feeling.
Death and grief are common, recurring themes in YA literature. Often teens in the novels struggle to cope with the death of a loved one—a parent, a sibling, a close friend—and sometimes they do it “right” (whatever that means) and sometimes they go off the rails (according to people around them).
Every story is different, obviously, because every character and every situation is unique, but the loss they struggle with is universal. Sometimes, like in novels such as The Hate U Give (2017) by Angie Thomas, or Brother (2017) by David Chariandy, the protagonists have additional burdens of injustice (both protagonists must learn to cope with the death of a young Black man at the hands of police), or Indigenous literature like Marrow Thieves (2017) by Cherie Dimaline or Indian Horse (2012) by Richard Wagamese which feature young protagonists struggling with the deaths of loved ones at the hand of racist government officials.
Other stories are quieter, less specifically about a preventable, reprehensible death, and more about the grief from loved ones succumbing to illness, such as classics like Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L.M. Montgomery, or Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger.
In fact, you don’t have to look very far to find death or grief in YA novels. The death of Evangeline’s mother in my YA fantasy Evangeline’s Heaven (2022) impacts my protagonist from the time she’s a young child. She barely remembers her mother; her father Lucifer is all she has, but still she clings to a part of her that’s always been missing. It alters the course of her life. In my forthcoming Amaranth novel (May 2024) Lyra is surrounded by death—in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. She herself is immune, and that fact alone makes her life lonely.
If death is a part of life, death is most definitely an important part of YA literature. We need it. We need to see how teens cope (or don’t cope) with grief. We need to see how people other than ourselves react to tragic loss. We need a roadmap, a guideline or even a what-not-to-do.
Because, ultimately, we need to feel like this overwhelming pain, grief, loss and heartache can be overcome. If our beloved characters can find a way through then maybe, just maybe, so can we.
I still think of Tammy. I’ve had decades of life experience; she’ll always be 15. I’ve experienced loss and even more profound grief since then, but I’ll never forget the confusion of my first taste of it.
Books helped me then. Books can help you now.
No matter how you respond to grief—whether you make awkward comments in front of a classmate’s casket and laugh too loud at the funeral—you’re not alone. Pick up a YA book to keep you company in your grief. You’ll always find someone who gets your pain.