Sinking House

"Sinking House"

Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand somebody else's feelings or difficulties. 

Nowadays, we never understand the feelings of others until we ourselves have experienced it. We are self-absorbed and selfish. 

In the “Sinking House,” Meg and Muriel are at opposite ends of their respective lives. While one is young and has a young husband and at the prime of her life, looking forward to life, the other is much older and is on the last leg of her life. With her husband is gone, she dwells on her memories. Oddly, Muriel becomes obsessed with turning her sprinklers and hose on all day, in which the excessive water floods into the neighbor’s home as if sinking the house. The water in the house is Muriel’s grief over her own life and the life of her husband. The only thing that makes her happy is the running water. It is as if the entire house is grieving with her. Until the police show up at Muriel’s home, Meg learns the power of empathy. She and her husband are more concerned about their own selfish needs that they fail to empathize the suffering of the widow. 

“And then it came to her. She’d turn them on –the sprinklers- just for a minute, to see what it felt like. She wouldn’t leave them on long- it could threaten the whole foundation of her house. That must she understood.” 

These houses represent the foundation in which we all live in- these lives measured by coffee spoons. This destruction of these homes comes to describe the epiphanies and struggles in which we all must undergo in order to pursue of rite of passage.