When Estelle left, it was like losing half of herself. She didn’t know how to function and could barely even breathe. That feeling never fully went away and she found herself stuck in the loneliness of life without him. Similar to Estelle’s situation, Jim lost his wife. The author claims that “Jim aged badly after she died, became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air that had gone out of him. When he sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him” (Backman 201). After Jim’s wife died, he was left alone and lost. He didn’t know what to do and let the loneliness take hold of him. His wife was the one person that held him together and kept him on track, so when she passed, he slipped into a dark hole. All in all, each of the experiences that these people went through contributed to their alienation. Each of them experiences something sad or traumatic that causes them to become stuck, never really moving on from what happened. This leads them to a dark and lonely place, separated from the rest of society. Works Cited Backman, F. (2023). Anxious
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