#2 Story: Cancer, death, and grief

Hey everyone! This post is just a plot point of my story and will include some ideas I have for symbolism that could be integrated.

Ideas for symbolism:

• Using wind to represent life (it is natural and light, in how it rises and falls.)
• Using a cool quote: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May – William Shakespeare (Cool because my mom’s name is May)
• Referencing the stages of grief somehow
• Physical distance in reference to emotional closeness

Exposition:

• Main Character: Me: a sensitive, reflective individual who has a distant kinship with my grandfather.
• Setting & Atmosphere: Shifts between intimate personal spaces (a family home, a train cabin) and evocative public rituals (a Beijing temple, a weathered graveyard) with nature as a constant presence (wind, weather, natural decay).
• Context: My grandfather’s life, once ordinary and now quietly obscured

Point of Attack:

• The sudden confrontation with the reality of death and loss
• Central Conflict: I must come to terms with her ambiguous grief for a man who was both intimately related yet fundamentally a stranger.
• To understand what it means to mourn and accept a familial loss that feels as fleeting and ungraspable as the wind.

Rising Action One:

• I attend a solemn ritual at a Beijing temple
• I see his portrait
• The sensory details must be prominent

Rising Action Two:

• Family dynamics
• A disruptive phone call brings news of my grandfather’s cancer
• Recollections of my grandfather’s life
• I weigh the memories of both comfort (my grandmother’s warm welcome) and alienation (my grandfather’s silent, distant presence)

Climax:

I don’t exactly want a climax to this story, but I’m imagining that part of it would be my mother’s outburst in the train. It would not be written in a passionate way.

Falling Action:

• I have a final conversation with my mother
• Understanding the natural world—the persistent, ever-changing wind—serves as a metaphor for the passage of time

Resolution:

• Acceptance
• The story closes on an open-ended reflection, inviting the reader to acknowledge that the dead live on as part of the natural, ever-present flow of life. Much like the wind that both carries and erases their traces

That’s about it! Thanks!