What is it like to watch the Earth after your death?

 Hi! I'm Phyllis and the book I'm reading is "The Lovely Bones"

    This book was given by my aunt and when I read the first sentence of the first page, it was “I was murdered when I was 14” and I blurted out to my aunt “才第一頁她就死了？” And yes, this book was a story told by a murdered girl called Susie from her perspective in heaven. At first, I thought it was kind of a spoiler because she not only told us she was dead but she also told us how she was murdered and who the murderer was at the very beginning. So, I thought to myself, I’ve known too much information, what am I going to read in the following hundreds of pages?

    Fortunately, there is still something I haven’t known, which is whether the police officers would find out who the murderer was and how they investigated this case. Moreover, how Susie’s living family members reacted to her death and how they went through this grief were both what I focus a lot on. My heart stings when I see Lindsey(Susie’s younger sister) asserting to everyone that she was OK but cried secretly, when Buckley(Susie’s little brother) innocently asked his parents where Susie was as a daily question, when  Susie’s father said that after Susie’s death, he didn’t wake up in a morning that he didn’t have to face the agony and when there’s nothing but emptiness in Susie’s mother’s eyes.

    Susie was raped and then murdered by a mid-aged man(Mr. Harvey) in her neighborhood. Mr. Harvey intercepted Susie’s way back home from school and invited her to the burrow he dug. Susie was iffy about this invitation but out of curiosity, she followed him to his burrow. After all, she thought, he knew her name and he was from her neighborhood, there should be no problem. However, it turned out that she was wrong and it was too late to regret it. And this made me think, Susie at some level should be blamed for her unwariness, but even a man from the neighborhood who you thought harmless could be the murderer, what a world is it, and is there anyone out there you can believe? In old times, our parents were taught to be helpful and kind to strangers. However, our parents taught us to be vigilant and not to talk to any strangers. It’s a sad truth that this world has lost our trust. Chances are that someday when you happen to need help, nobody will come to you.

    The perspective of Susie from heaven also appeals to me a lot. From heaven, she could overlook the whole world and observe anyone who she wanted to look at wherever the person was or whatever the person was doing. I think it’s extremely novel that she could still somehow be a part of the earth after her death and could keep track of the whole process of her case. However, apart from the novelty, I believe what Susie felt more was anguish because she had to see how tears bathed the cheeks of her family and how bumpy and unsmooth the investigation was. Worst of all, she could see her family but her family couldn’t see her. She was lonely and that could last a lot while. There’s an old saying “it is the living ones that are suffering.”(活者的人比死的人痛苦) Nonetheless, if heaven really exists just like this book and the dead are able to overlook the earth, I think this old saying is unfitting because the dead not only suffer their own suffering but also suffer the living’s suffering. I speculate the reason why this old saying exists was that the living ones can’t see the dead, nor can they see them suffering.

    I’m looking forward to seeing more thought-provoking things in this book and to know how the investigation will proceed.