IDK University Redemption and Grief in Cheryl Strayed Wild Essay

This essay involves writing about two themes in the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The two subjects I chose for the themes are Redemption and Grief/Loss. The instructions are in the pictures I have attached. I have already found quotes to choose from for the essay (they are pasted below). There are 10 quotes to choose from for the first subject/theme (Redemption) and 10 quotes for the second subject/theme (Grief/Loss). I have not established the themes for either subjects yet, I have just chosen the subjects and found quotes that could potentially be used.

A) Subject: Redemption

1. Cheryl laughed when Pat told her, “to heal the wound your father made, you’re going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior” (Strayed 205).
2. When thinking about Paul, Cheryl thinks, “What if I forgave myself?…What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?” (Strayed 258).
3. While sitting on her picnic table, Cheryl “didn’t feel sad or happy. [She] didn’t feel proud or ashamed. [She] only felt that in spite of all the things [she’d] done wrong, in getting [herself] [there], [she’d] done right” (Strayed 189).
4. As Cheryl reminisces about her old self she states,“there, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous” (Strayed 57).
5. When discussing her past mistakes, Cheryl expresses, “I was trying…to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself” (Strayed 36).
6. As Cheryl sat in the rocking chair, she noticed “there was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began” (Strayed 273).
7. Once Cheryl stepped into the snow she thought “that perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me” (Strayed 143).
8. When Aimee and Cheryl arrived in Minneapolis, Cheryl expressed, “I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good” (Strayed 57).
9. While hiking along the Pacific Crest Trail Cheryl “chose to tell [herself] a different story from the one women are told. [She] decided [she] was safe. [She] was strong. [She] was brave. Nothing could vanquish [her]” (Strayed 51).
10. As Cheryl sat on the white bench, she thought, “I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough” (Strayed 311).

B) Subject: Grief/Loss

1. When discussing her mom Cheryl declared, “Her death…had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance…She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again” (Strayed 267).
2. While on her Pacific Crest Trail hike, Cheryl thought “nothing bad could happen to me…The worst thing already had” (Strayed 59).
3. After the death of her mother, Cheryl revealed, “I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods” (Strayed 27).
4. As Cheryl sat in the shade of a grocery store parking lot, she thought, “One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret” (Strayed 151).
5. After arriving in the town of Mojave, California, Cheryl “[laid] down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That [she’d] surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed” (Strayed 28).
6. While in denial of her mother’s death,Cheryl states, “it hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life” (Strayed 20).
7. After waking up at White’s Motel, Cheryl “saw [herself] then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart” (Strayed 38).
8. As Cheryl continued her Pacific Crest hike, she “looked up at the blue sky, feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling [her] mother’s presence, remembering why it was that [she’d] thought [she] could hike this trail” (Strayed 59).
9. Cheryl came to a stop along her Pacific Crest hike and thought, “watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done” (Strayed 95).
10. In grief of her mother, Cheryl expressed, “nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end” (Strayed 27).