Epiphany in 57 Days by AJ Strosahl Essay Example

Epiphanies are something that can happen to everyone. It can happen randomly when you are at the grocery store or when you are doing work. It’s something that people will experience sometime in their life since that realization of a past memory won’t click into their head until a random moment happens. In the story, “Fifty-Seven Days” by AJ Strosahl, we see that Marie’s mother worries about her daughter's obsession with death. She knows that it’s taking a mental toll on her when she should be worrying about school. There have been many moments in her life where her daughter has worried about death and Marie’s mother could never understand why she had this obsession over something that she shouldn’t be worrying about that much at her age. She would start to have that epiphany moment when she realizes that the reason for this is because of her past actions. 

At the beginning of the story, we see her mothers’ perspective on death when she tries to calm down her daughter when she tries to bury the cat that she ran over with her car. According to the text, Marie’s mother says, “This stuff happens sometimes. It’s alright.” This evidence supports this point because that’s the way that life is with death. It’s something that will happen to everyone in life, and we can’t predict when and where it will happen. In this case, Marie wouldn’t have known that she would have killed the cat with her car since she probably couldn’t have seen the cat while driving. There is also more evidence to prove this claim when Marie’s mother says, “They say in AA that you have to accept the things you cannot change, and I’ve started to believe it.” This makes sense why she tries to be very calm to her daughter since she has had this perception for a while. Most people would also have this perception since death is something that everyone will experience at some point in their life. It’s something that we can’t change since that is the ending course of everyone's life. It’s something that we just accept will happen even if it’s a sad thing to think about. 

Later in the story, we see that epiphany moment happen when Marie’s mother notices that the reason why her daughter is like this is because of her alcohol addiction. This would start when she dated her father, and they would “race around town after my shifts at the bar, taking shots of Jägermeister all night until everything was a blur.” That is when her epiphany happened since she didn’t know that her past actions could affect her child’s life that much. This is mostly shown in Marie’s behavior since alcohol can affect your physical behavior and from what we know, Marie worries a lot about death when at her age this shouldn’t be a thing that she needs to care about too much. Obviously, it isn’t a bad thing to worry about heavy topics like death, but since it takes up a lot of Maries life, she needs to worry about other things in her life. There is evidence that proves this as well when Marie’s mother says, “I want her to worry about developmentally appropriate things: boys, the deathlessness of high school gossip, college admissions. I wanted her to be anguished by her own dumb hungry body, and not much else, in the way of normal teenagers.” This shows that Marie’s mother wants her to just live a normal teenage life and worry about the important things in her life that matter at this moment. She knows how much this whole obsession over death has taken over her life since there have been days where Marie’s mother has noticed that her daughter has felt tired.  

In the end of the story, Marie’s mother talks about the moment when she got bit by a sea urchin. This makes her ponder if this was the whole reason she was obsessed with death. This can be seen in the text when she says, “As Marie drives us home in silence, I wonder for the first time what she remembers of that day: the shock and betrayal of her injury? How the grocer patted her small hands as I gently plucked the spines out, one by one? It occurs to me only now that I’ve never bothered to ask her.” This evidence proves this point because she knows that this was the starting moment that could have led her to be so attached to the concept of death. Even though Marie was only four when this happened, that moment would have been something that she would have remembered for a long time. Marie’s mother probably didn’t think too much about it when it happened since it’s a small little incident, but now knowing the reason why she acts this way over death, she would want to talk to her daughter about the incident and hopefully be able to help her act the way that a normal teenage girl should act. 

In conclusion, the epiphany moment that Marie’s mother had made her realize that her past alcoholic addictions had a big impact on her daughter. She didn’t know that the alcohol addiction that she had months ago could make her daughter so emotional over death. This is mostly because Marie’s mother was uneducated about the effects of alcohol that would happen to her child. Now that she knows the reasoning for her daughter's death obsession, she will stop drinking and try the best that she can to help her daughter act like a normal teenager. It will definitely take a long time, but any improvement that Marie’s mother can make will be a big improvement for Marie’s life.