him"' (129). The "stupid dog pile" that kills Mitt hints at what he would have to face

ultimately if he were alive and grew up in a society that pushes its minorities to the

bottom of its social ladder and mistreats them with prejudice and discrimination.

 On a personal level, the absurd death of their son also means to Henry and Lelia a

parental failure to protect their child that causes them an agonizing sense of guilt and

grief. Parental grief, as clinical studies show, is closely related to survivor's guilt and

parents' perceived failure in sheltering their children from danger.323 Mitt's death

crystallizes into a hardened knot of trauma for Henry's and Lelia. Consequently, as a

symptom of the unrelenting parental guilt and grief, the heavy weight that kills Mitt

haunts them, riveting them in the very painful moments of their son's death and causing

them to reenact the tragic scene in their grief. In a doleful scene of lovemaking in which

they desperately try to appease the pain that is still raw quite some time after the tragedy,

Henry and Lelia become their lost son in a sad ritual.


 During certain nights, I pulled a half-sleeping Lelia back onto my body, right onto
 my chest, and breathed as barely as I could. She knew what to do, what to do
 me, that I was Mitt, that then she was Mitt, our pile of two as heavy as the balance
 of all those boys who had now grown up. We nearly pressed each other to death,
 our swollen lips and eyes, wishing upon ourselves the fall of tears, that great free
 anger, that obese heft of melancholy. ... In the bed, in the space between us, it was
 about the sad way of all flesh, alive or dead or caught in between, it was about what
 must happen between people who lose forever the truest moment of their union.
 Flesh, the pressure, the rhymes of gasps. This was all we could find in each other,
 this novel language of our life. (106)


 The gripping force of traumatic pain is obvious in the couple's terribly lonesome

and sad lovemaking, which turns into a suffocating scene of death where each parent

becomes the dying child who lies crushed by the pressure of thrashing bodies among

gasping sounds. As if replaying the scene of Mitt's death in slow motion, Henry and