“What’s wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
When it really comes down to it, everyone has their own way of dealing with life. How do you cope with life’s challenges? Do you keep to yourself and quietly fight your own battles, do you disclose things to those closest to you, do you find strength in the embrace and trust of God, or do you just put on a false mask to hide the hardships you’re facing in hopes they’ll just go away? The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, gives us insight into the lives of two different characters who have their own ways of coping, Lily Ownes and May Boatwright. Both these characters are the inverse of each other when it comes to their way of confronting various challenges brought on by life. As readers follow their story and see the outcomes of their decisions, they’re able to personally choose how to react to tribulations of life after seeing the two majorly different outcomes.
WARNING: NOVEL SPOILERS BELOW ! ! !
Let’s dive into Lily’s side of the story first.
After Lily confesses to August about her life of lies she’d been living ever since she moved into the honey house, August gives Lily and readers an insight into her realistic and forgiving view of the world when she explained that, “There is nothing perfect…only life”(Kidd 256). August has come to have full recognition that life is filled with just has many hard times as good times, if not more. Knowing this about life, August chooses to approach things in a very sensible and calm manner, and ends up passing on this view to Lily. Lily goes on to explain to August that she carries around an exceedingly large amount of baggage concerning her mother’s death…(and how could someone avoid this sort of regret if they picked up a loaded gun and accidentally shot the bullet that ended their own mothers life at only four years old…) August’s own words chime in Lily’s ears as she recalls her saying, “Regrets don’t help anything…”(Kidd 280). Because of August’s words of encouragement like these, Lily began to have a new point of view on things; she learned that it’s okay not to be okay and to need someone to simply understand.
“[Lily] I decided…I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it…’(Kidd 258). She learned how to accept all the good and bad aspects of life, “[Lily] I thought…How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is”(Kidd 285).
Most importantly she learned that her strength was always inside of her she just needed to find it, “[August]…when you start pulling back into doubt…she’s the one inside saying, ‘Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are”(Kidd 289).
Contrary to this point of view is May Boatwrights, who has a very distressed view of things and dwells on the hardships of life to an unhealthy extent. May is the insight of an individual’s approach to life who chooses to box in all their emotions for themselves and abide in the never ending difficulties that come with life. After a very close family friend of theirs, Zach, was put in jail for being falsely accused of hitting another man with a bottle, everyone does their best to withhold this information from May due to fear of how she would react. Despite these attempts, May finds out and takes it harder than anything she had before. Rather than discussing her innermost feelings with those around her, she decided to go to what she called her “Wailing Wall”, where she wrote down things that saddened her and stuck them in the wall to make her feel better. Instead she journeyed into the woods, and they ended up finding her dead in the river after she committed suicide.
May goes on to explain in her suicide note that, “[May] I’m tired of carrying around the weight of the world”(Kidd 210). But could that feeling have been avoided? May was surrounded by open arms ready to hold her as well as hearts and minds ready to share the burden of her thoughts and feelings. Why did she never choose to confide in other like Lily did? What if she had, would she have been able to survive?
We were never designed to live this life alone. I believe that God knew the sufferings that this life contains and because of that we are given family and friends to rely on when the going gets tough. It’s okay to not always be in a state of adequacy. It’s okay to allow your thoughts and feelings meet the ears of others. It’s all okay. After writing this I, myself, feel the need to re evaluate the manner in which I cope with the burdens of life. So take a breath and ask yourself the next time you find yourself in the face of adversity, how do I handle things? What’s the healthiest and best way for me to get through this and what can I do to achieve that?
We are ALL on different paths in life, but we are ALL still facing something (cliche I know, but it is as true as it gets)
Citations
- Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. Penguin Books, 2013.
The Secrets Within 