Goodbye Days

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Disclaimer: Goodbye Days deals heavily with grief and loss. There may be students in your class who have experienced a loss. You may want to alert your guidance counselor that you are planning to discuss this book. They can provide resources for students who may be struggling. This list of resources may also prove useful for students.

Short Answer

1. The five stages of the grieving process are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What are some of the mental and physical reactions people may have to grief? Why is it important to explore the emotions that grief brings—what can happen when people don't have the chance to express their grief? What types of “grief rituals” (like memorial services) do people use to work through loss?

Teaching Suggestion: Goodbye Days uses internal monologues, flashbacks, and dreams to convey Carver’s emotional evolution (e.g., Chapters 20, 22, 26). Reviewing these devices will help students recognize Carver’s grief processing as he progresses through the stages of grief. Students should recognize that, although these are not action-driven plot points, they are still essential to Carver’s character development and move the narrative forward.

Helpful links:

• Introduce students to the grief cycle model. You might create a visual map of each stage and the possible mental and physical manifestations it could bring. Make the lesson tangible by creating an imaginary persona—e.g., “Bob” has just lost his best friend.
• Discuss grief rituals. In addition to discussing grief rituals students may be familiar with, like a memorial service or funeral, talk about grief rituals in other countries and cultures. Ask students to identify similarities across diverse traditions. What traits do they share?

2.   Goodbye Days explores the "butterfly effect," ultimately suggesting that it's risky to seek this level of causality in a chaotic world. Ray Bradbury’s short story "A Sound of Thunder" is often associated with this term—in this time-travel tale, the death of a single butterfly is enough to change the course of future events for humans. Read Bradbury’s short story with students to introduce the idea of the butterfly effect. Do they believe in this concept? Why or why not?

Teaching Suggestion: The butterfly effect is often used in storytelling to portray many different outcomes for a single scenario. Ask students if they can name other books, movies, or TV shows that explore this idea (e.g., Russian Doll; Groundhog Day; Frequency; Donnie Darko; The Butterfly Effect; Run Lola Run). Identifying the “what if” scenarios in other works can help them analyze the big “what if” (“what if Carver hadn’t texted Mars while he was driving?”) in Goodbye Days. This also prepares them to face off with one of the book’s central themes—the Danger of Believing in Causality in a Chaotic World.

• This short YouTube video can help introduce students to the butterfly effect from a scientific standpoint.
• This Jurassic Park clip (start at about 00:23) also offers (a more humorous) explanation.

Short Activity

Explore representations of grief through a short writing activity. Have students write a brief paragraph describing a person who is in one of the stages of grieving. Students should write the paragraph in third person so they are describing the person from the outside, without conveying their inner thoughts or feelings. How do they look, talk, or act? Then, have students get into groups of 4 or 5 and share their character sketches, allowing the others in the group to guess what “stage” of grief is being portrayed.

Teaching Suggestion: Have each group choose one story to share with the class for everyone to guess. Ideally, you will have a diversity of grief stages portrayed, driving home to students that grief is a diverse, multifaceted journey and takes many forms. This will prepare students for the representations of grief seen in the book, giving them greater empathy for the various characters’ reactions (such as Adair’s anger).