Summary
Part 9 introduces the speaker's sister, whose children and husband died in a car crash. The speaker says that the sister is a psychiatrist but is unable to help herself (61). According to the speaker, the sister's world is crumbling, and she is allowing it to happen. Below the introduction of the speaker's sister is a picture of signs on a lawn that read "FUNERAL NO PARKING" (61). It is not on a TV screen. Following this, the speaker tells us that she listens to her sister but she says nothing. She and her sister cry in public, mourning the loss of their family members. The speaker finds herself in her car, putting the key in the ignition, driving away from her sister. She questions who her sister will be "when she is too tired to cry" (61). There is a quotation from Paul Celan following this question about grief.
After this scene, there is a break in the prose with a lyric moment about loneliness. The speaker then describes seeing a college friend in SoHo whose parents have both died. The friend's mother died while she was flying over the Atlantic on her way home from her father's funeral. When the speaker sees her friend, she is wearing her deceased mother's fur coat. The speaker notes that her friend "seems fine" and questions whether we are "not responsible for the lives of our parents" (63). As someone's daughter or son, we can be prepared for our parents' deaths before they come: "We can expect. We can resolve. We can come to terms with" (63). The speaker contrasts this acceptance of death with the attitude of her sister who, in response to seeing her friend in SoHo, "feels erased" (63). The speaker characterizes her sister's grief as "active"—it is completely unlike the speaker's college friend's calmness. Part 9 finishes with the speaker waking up beside "a husband" who asks her, in lyric form, "Sweetheart, honey, dearest, / how did you sleep?" (63).
In Part 10, the speaker reacts to a news story about a thirteen-year-old boy getting convicted for murdering a six-year-old little girl. An image of a young boy looking up at a woman is enclosed in a TV. The boy and the woman both have looks of despair on their faces. When the speaker looks up the story in the New York Times, she discovers that the little girl sustained injuries including "a torn liver, fractured skull, and broken ribs" (67). The speaker learns that the boy will be tried as an adult because of this incident, and the speaker laments the loss of his childhood. The speaker notes that the boy insisted throughout his trial that he was just play-wrestling with the little girl and did not mean to hurt her.
The speaker understands the media's representation of the boy's trial as "being alone with the facts" (67). There is little compassion for the boy, who will be unequivocally changed by going to prison. The speaker says that the collective response to this incident is that this boy "will forever happen in our minds as a dead child" (67). The speaker notices that the boy's mother is crying and her tears create parallel lines on her face. This scene gives the speaker a headache. She notes that on the Tylenol bottle the recommended dosage for adults is different than it is for children.
To close Part 10, the speaker moves into the description of a dream where she is "sitting on a huge pill bottle" (68). Beneath the introduction of the dream is an image of a warning label: "Do Not Take Aspirin Or Aspirin-Containing Products Without Knowledge And Consent Of Your Physician" (68). In the dream, the pill bottle is so large that the speaker would have to jump from it to reach the ground. She cannot open the bottle, even though its lid moves a little. She can see all of the pills in the bottle from above. She is so up high she is completely alone, yet she can hear a voice in her ear: "She is dead, finished, no dreamscape can help her now" (68).
Analysis
In Part 9, following the scene with the speaker's sister whose family has died, the speaker says that she wakes up in bed beside "a husband" who greets her (63). It is important to note that the speaker chooses to describe this person as "a husband" rather than "my husband" (63). It highlights the fact that her sister's husband has passed away while hers continues to live. The specific personalities of these husbands are not important; what is emphasized in this passage is that the speaker still has "a husband," still has someone to fill that role in her life, while her sister does not. Additionally, using the pronoun "a" instead of the possessive pronoun "my" highlights the fact that none of the characters throughout this work refer only to specific people. One should be wary of assuming that the speaker in this poem is one person or that the voice of the poet and the speaker are the same. This principle extends to the people surrounding the speaker as well. We should avoid thinking about them as real people and instead should understand them simply for what they are—various multidimensional characters within specific scenarios.
An interesting element of Part 10 is that the singular first-person voice interacts with a collective first-person ("we") around the account of the thirteen-year-old boy. The speaker sees little differentiation between the singular "I" and the collective "we": "I, or we, it hardly matters, seek out the story in the Times" (67). The speaker is placing her own singular response to this news story among a collective response that feels the same way that she does. The speaker and the collective feel the same about the news story and the fate of the child: "He will forever happen in our minds as a dead child" (67). (Note the use of "our" rather than "my"). This plural "we" inserts a collective contemporary response to this news story that adds a chorus-like effect to the speaker's lamentations. They back her up as she questions whether this was really the best decision to make. This collective is not invisible or intangible—it whispers in the speaker's ear when she feels upset about the boy's indictment: "As I stare at the label, from somewhere a voice whispers in my ear: Take comfort in our strength" (67). This voice characterizes the collective as a community that feels personally wronged by the indictment of the child. It is the voices of the black community in America who see people like Timothy McVeigh (Part 7) being sympathized with by the media and take note of how differently white and black defendants are treated in our society. The moment with McVeigh sharply contrasts the scene with this child: while the media outlets ask whether the families of the victims have forgiven McVeigh, they coldly lay out the facts of this child's crime and strip him of his childhood in the process.
The speaker, unlike the media, feels sympathetic towards the boy. She equates the boy's indictment as a kind of death—the death of childhood. The theme of the gray area between life and death arises again in this scene, as the speaker sees the boy's transformation in prison as a kind of death that will change him completely: "In the time it takes for the appeal to happen he will be a dead child in an adult prison. He will be alive as someone else" (67). Thus, the speaker is questioning the power that "the court" has to take a person's childhood away. Because he remains a child, taking his childhood away is a way to deny his existence: "There are no children anymore, at least not this boy—this boy who is only a child" (67).
In Part 10, the speaker uses the devices of questioning and metaphor to suggest that the court's decision was too harsh. Inserting questions into the poem causes the reader to question these things as well. The speaker wonders, "what child behaves like this? What child behaves like this, knows the consequences, and still insists he was playing at being a wrestler?" (67). At this moment, the speaker is forcing us as the readers to question the court's decision and decide for ourselves if it was too harsh. She also uses a metaphor of the label on a bottle of Tylenol to show how society normally differentiates adults from children. This moment is meant to highlight that there is a problem with a social system that acknowledges differences between adults and children in the medical sphere, but not in the legal sphere. They are given very little responsibility until something goes wrong, and then they are given full responsibility for their actions.
Finally, it is interesting to note the self-awareness of the speaker in Part 10. She explicitly tells the reader that she is claiming a dream that she did not experience as her own "in an attempt to convey a desired sense" (68). This further emphasizes what we have seen so far in Don't Let Me Be Lonely: we cannot take everything the speaker says as simply a report of her personal experiences. Instead, we must understand the speaker's voice as a unifying thread that brings together elements in order to construct a narrative.
