Death is an evident theme in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Jonathan Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Death causes people to reminisce on the deceased, how they died, and the last time they spoke.  In both novels whether or not the deceased died alone affects the closure of the living.

            In Extremely Loud and incredibly Close, Oskar Schell returns home from school to five messages left by his father.  The phone rings, but Oskar doesn’t pick up, causing a sixth message to be made.  His inability to pick up the phone causes him to feel as if his father died alone, without any loved ones around him.  Feeling like he let his father die alone, Oskar is unable to find a sense of closure.  He imagines all the ways his father could have died and tries desperately to figure out how his father actually died.  His sense of closure is delayed until he is able to admit his mistake.

            Similar to Oskar Schell’s father, Gogol Ganguli’s father died alone.  When Gogol cleans his father’s room “he cannot remember the last time he and his father had spoken.” (177).  Gogol then proceeds to imagine the daily routine of his father and what his father did the day he died.  Like Oskar, Gogol’s path to closure is a long one, due to the belief that he abandoned his father while he was alive.  After hearing the story behind his name, Gogol feels like he abandoned his father, but as he begins to accept the name he is able to gain closure.

            In The Namesake, Ashima Ganguli receives a phone call and expects it to be about the death of her grandmother. Upon receiving the news that her father is dead, Ashima doesn’t imagine what her father did before he died like Gogol and Oskar did.  She doesn’t have their feelings of abandonment because she followed the practices of her culture as her father wanted.  Since she felt like she followed her father’s wishes and that he father died around loved ones, Ashima acquires a sense of closure allowing her to move on.

            In the end, dying around loved ones makes closure more feasible.  When people feel they abandoned the deceased, like Oskar and Gogol, they take longer to gain closure.