The Five Stages of Grief with Natalia

 Hi everyone! I hope you all have been having a relaxing reading break! 

I enjoyed this novel the best out of the ones we have read so far. In my blog post, I will briefly summarize how Natalia goes through the five stages of grief and what I thought was questionable. Time of the Doves takes place in Barcelona. Time of the Doves has a wholesome beginning. That is what I thought when reading the words on the pages. Natalia has broken up with her old boyfriend and is swept off her feet by Quimet when he asks her for a dance and calls her Colometa, which means dove in Catalan. Then, Natalia and Quimet are set to be married. Natalia and Quimet have what is called to have a "wedding week" instead of a wedding night. Quimet wants to have a child, and the couple has two. One child is Antoni (a boy), and a girl is named Rita. Sadly, Quimet becomes an absentee father and shows his inconsistency for his family by raising pigeons (doves) and aspiring to make money from them. He also proudly works on his motorbike. A woman writes this novel. This novel is written from the female perspective, as Natalia is the narrator. I realized this was a female's perspective when she said, "My father remarried and me a young woman all alone…" (16). One thing that worried me while I was reading was the scene when Natalia tried and almost killed the baby doves before they hatched.

The war started, and soon Quimet was sent away, so that was a hard time for Natalia even though he was already an absent father; losing him to the war, however, is a different feeling of loss. Antoni is sent to a camp for refugee children. Natalia is at home with Rita and has lost the two men in her life. Natalia loses her beloved pastry shop. When I was reading this, I felt sorry for her because soon, everything came crashing down in her life. Since Natalia needs money, she sells all her sheets, cutlery, etc. So she can buy food; however, because of the war, there is not much food on the shelves in the supermarket, and the only meat they sell is horsemeat. I could never eat that. Subsequently, Natalia gets told that Quimet has died in action, and Natalia is heartbroken from my perspective.

I think Natalia goes through the five stages of grief. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think Natalia was angry and depressed and a bit in denial when she found out Quimet had died because she had the insight to kill her children with hyaluronic acid. However, she could not get any acid to kill her children, and I think that was the Universe saving her children from their deranged mother. In the lecture, Jon-Beasley-Murray asks us if we judge Natalia on what she will do to her children—grievous sins. I think Natalia is going through a lot of pain, guilt and anger. She called herself "having the main strength as a dead cat" (145). I believe Natalia was feeling much self-judgement at the time after she was thinking of killing her children, and she reframes that feeling into acceptance, which is the last stage of grief, in order for her to get some healing from the death of Quimet. In my opinion, I would judge the decision that she was about to make, but I would not judge Natalia's character. She was going through a great deal. 

Discussion Question #1: Do you agree that Natalia was going through the five stages of grief after Quimet had died?

I’ll take our Professor's question as well as I am curious about other people's answers,

Discussion Question #2: Would you judge Natalia on what she was going to do to her children?