“Death Ends a Life, Not a Relationship”
An Analysis of “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” Humans often struggle to cope with mortality. Amy Hempel’s short story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” offers a stark reflection on the nature of grief. In the story, a young woman grapples with the task of visiting her terminally ill best friend in the hospital. Death induces feelings of fear, guilt, and denial, and these sentiments may stimulate a decline in a relationship. Through the use of imagery and parallelism, Hempel communicates our desire for distraction in the face of imminent death and how we must come to terms with the reality that we are impermanent. Hempel employs beach and earthquake imagery to convey the essentiality…show more content… The narrator coincides with the story of the chimp, “fluent now in the language of grief” after the death of her child (Hempel, 10). At her friend’s complaint of “I feel like hell. I’m about to stop have fun,” the narrator shares more trivial facts and useless stories and stops her friend from speaking of “feeling like hell” and momentarily distracts herself from her friend’s harrowing situation. According to Robert Peltier, “this brush with reality has, apparently, been too much for the narrator” and she refuses to stay the night at the hospital at her friend’s request, even though she has already failed to visit her friend for two months after she was hospitalized, making her role as “the Best Friend” questionable (Peltier, 2). Shortly before her friend is “moved to the cemetery,” the narrator sees nurses consoling her friend, who has hidden in a supply closet following the narrator’s rejection, and providing the comfort the narrator cannot. After her friend’s death, the narrator longs to forget all but the pointless things she once told her friend, and attempts to justify her failure as a friend and to alleviate her guilt, saying “it is just possible I will say I stayed the night. And who is there that can say that I did not?” (Hempel, 10). The narrator believes herself to also be “fluent in the language of