Reflection "After" Looking for Alaska

Losing someone that you care about is something that is very hard to get over. It is something that you don’t see coming and it happens when you least expect it. When you have the people that you love, you don’t realize that you wouldn’t be able to live if they weren’t with you. Since you don’t realize this, you act as if they were nobody and sometimes you don’t appreciate them as they are. You also want more from them when that is all they can give to you. After they leave you when you least expect it, you realize how much you loved them and how much you miss them now that they are gone. You finally see what you had and how good it was once you lost it. You can lose a friendship and notice how good it was once they are gone.

A question that is repeated a lot in the story is: How do we get out of this labyrinth of suffering? A character in the story, Pudge, answered this question how he thought it was and I disagree with him. He said that to get out of the labyrinth you get recycled and that the real life is what you find after you get out of the labyrinth. I think that there is no answer to this; your life is the labyrinth. You don’t have to get out of the labyrinth; you have to choose which way to go in the labyrinth. I think that the labyrinth is your life and all you have to do is choose which way to go in your life/labyrinth.

The only time that I lost someone that was close to me was when I was in first grade. I had no idea what was going on but I understood that I wouldn’t see her again. This, however, did not change anything because I was too little to understand what was going on. Then another time that this happened to me was that my grandmother’s brother passed away. I didn’t get to know him so when this happened it didn’t affect me as much as it did to other people. What happened later was that I felt like I should have gotten to know him before this happened. I felt like I didn’t appreciate him when he was alive.

When Pudge and the Colonel found out about their best friend dieing, at first, they couldn’t believe it. Pudge started saying that it was not true and that it was just a prank. Then when he talked with the Eagle, he realized that it was true. After that you started to blame himself. He started to think that if he would have tried to stop her, then she would be alive. I think that this happened because of the shock. At first they don’t believe it and then they take fault for it. Later Pudge and the Colonel started to leave other people out from there group thinking that they were the only people who really understood them. By doing this they didn’t realize that they were about to lose another friend. Because of the shock of there best friend dieing, they forgot about their own lives.