fraser's dead mommy

[schmerica]

Okay, so I've seen Call of the Wild quite a few times now, right? And the one thing that I still don't get is the Muldoon-killing-Caroline-Fraser thing. I mean, the dialogue goes like this:

Fraser: Why didn't you tell me?

Bob: It seems misguided now but you were so young at the time, just a young boy. I was full of rage I didn't want to pass that to you. I wanted to protect you.

But I still don't get -- how did Fraser think his mother died? Did he never wonder about it? Did they have a different version that they told him (Fraser's saying "why didn't you tell me" there, not "why did you lie to me?", which seems different)? Where was he when this happened? Wouldn't he have been around? He remembers other stuff from that age and younger. Was it just something never mention ever in the whole rest of his life?

This plagues my mind, really. I suppose it might just be one of those things you have to fill in for yourself, but it bugs me nonetheless.

Comments

[calathea.livejournal.com]

I have a friend whose younger brother died when she was about 6. He was killed when a drunk driver lost control of his car and drove onto the sidewalk into a group of people waiting to cross a road. My friend remembered her brother clearly, but it was only when we were in our last year at uni together that she found out how he had died, and all the terrible circumstances of the accident, in which her aunt was also injured.

What struck my friend as odd is that she cannot remember ever asking or even wondering how he died, and nor can her siblings. In many other ways, her family was entirely functional - they grieved for the child, remembered him on anniversaries like birthdays. My friend remembers many sad days when her mother would cry and her father would be angry. She found out, in the end, when one of her older sisters decided to get married and hopefully have children. She started a conversation when several female members of the family were present about whether the brother had died of an illness that could be hereditary.

My guess would be that my friend and her siblings at some point saw so many signals that their brother's death was not to be spoken of in any detail, that they didn't even ask, they never talked about it amongst themselves, or even wondered about it in their own minds.

I suppose the point of this long-winded comment is that I have seen it for real - a huge traumatic incident that should, by rights, have been one of the headlines of the mutual life of my friend's family, but wasn't. My friend often says that she can't imagine what she was thinking all those years, not to be curious about her brother's death, but she just wasn't. She was devastated when she found out, not only because of the way he died, but because of all the years when she hadn't bothered to find out more.