Death

I really appreciated how Munro juxtaposed the experiences of death in this story as a way of highlighting the difference between childhood and adulthood. The prime difference is how we understand mortality. When you are a kid, you generally have little grasp of death, or the brevity of life, or the fragility of life. You may have witnessed death; but you don't really accept your own mortality until you get older. Death is something you can play at, something that's romantic, like soldiers dying on a battlefield with women wailing lamentations, and it's reversible. When you are tired of being dead, you get back up and rejoin the game. And then of course when you grow up, you discover that death is not a game, it's not romantic, and it's not reversible. It's ugly and haunting and tragic and it's with you forever and ever — until you yourself die. It's something that — even with all the power and richness of a young imagination — cannot really be imagined by the young.

And I think we are to understand that as a blessing of youth. And it seems like some of the "awakenings" people have in Munro's stories have something to do with feeling blessed again, even for a moment.