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Sudden DeathWhat Bridge to Terabithia still teaches us.

By Emily Bazelon
Updated Monday, Feb. 26, 2007, at 1:09 PM ET

Spoiler alert: This piece gives away the ending of Bridge to Terabithia.

Bridge to Terabithia. Click image to expand.

Katherine Paterson wrote the 1977 children's classic Bridge to Terabithia after her son David's best friend, Lisa Hill, died at age 8 after being struck by lightning. "I was trying to make sense of a tragedy that made no sense," Paterson says in this interview with Christianity Today. In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where "someone long forgotten had hung a rope." They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic. Until the day the rope snaps and she falls to her death. When I read the book at 10 or 11, it was frightening and absorbing precisely because Leslie's accident felt unexpected, random, senseless.

But when I saw the new movie of Terabithia—co-written and produced by David Paterson—I watched it through the eyes of a parent. This time, Leslie's death seemed senseless, but not random. This is a story in which the adventurous child dies and the cautious child lives. Yet somehow the lesson is not that Jess and Leslie should never have swung on the rope to their enchanted spot. Rather, the story suggests how "death is always at the back of risk and beauty," as the friend I saw the movie with put it. That message, of life's indelible tragic contours, helps explain the power of Paterson's story 30 years after it was written and its relevance for our addled child-rearing times.

In the movie, Leslie's death is in the air, and in the musical score, the minute she spots the rope and rushes for it. She sees it hanging from a branch high above the creek bed, climbs onto a stump for a better perch to swing from, and soars out over the water. Jess tries to keep Leslie off the rope at first, warning her that it could be dangerous. (Send me an e-mail if you know exactly what he says.) (Update: Thanks to readers. Jess' line is, "It's been there forever, I wouldn't trust it.") Leslie ignores him, and the film shows each of them in their exhilarating moment of flight, faces tilted toward the sky. The rope becomes part of their afternoon ritual. Leslie's fall from it months later happens off-camera.

The foreshadowing in the book comes much later in the story. Leslie and Jess go to the crossing and find the creek in the gully roaring, swelled by rainfall. Jess looks at the rope, and Katherine Paterson writes that "his stomach felt cold." "Maybe we ought to forget it today," he says. But Leslie answers, "'C'mon, Jess. We can make it." They do. The water continues to rise, and Jess begins to dread their return visit. "It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid." The next morning, a Saturday, Jess' adored music teacher offers to take him on his first trip to an art museum. Jess is an artist who draws "the way some people drink whiskey," and he leaps at the invitation. He could ask if Leslie can come along, but he doesn't (he wants the teacher to himself). Leslie tries to cross to Terabithia on her own, and the old rope breaks.

The novel Bridge to Terabithia has a strong and real boy-girl friendship at its center, a well-handled class divide (Jess's hardscrabble farm and Leslie's comfortable home), and the revelation that bullies and monster-mouth teachers can be sympathetic, too. But the book is a Newbery Medal-winner and a staple of fifth and sixth grade English because of its unsparing rendering of Jess' grief: "Leslie—dead—girl friend—rope—broke—fell—you—you—you." And denial: The next morning, he eats two stacks of pancakes that "tasted marvelous." We feel both Jess' guilt for his absence and his anger at Leslie. "She went swinging on that rope just to show him that she was no coward. So there, Jess Aarons."

When people tell Katherine Paterson that they've given the book to a child whose friend has died, she worries it's too late, because the book works better as "emotional practice." But it's easy to understand the impulse, because one piece or another of Jess' grief will resonate. The book's death focus goes too far for some people. Terabithia is ninth on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books. In an essay for the New York Times Book Review, she defends it by arguing that children need not only the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, but also "proper endings" in which "hope is a yearning, rooted in reality."

But forget the kids for a minute. What about parents, Leslie's parents, in particular?

For much of the book, they come off as dilettante-ish and neglectful in a benign way, as Paterson depicts them. But when they lose their daughter, they become their best selves. "She loved you, you know," Leslie's father says to Jess, this local boy who might have been relied on to keep his daughter away from an old unreliable rope. "Thank you for being such a wonderful friend to her." That's it. No questions. Of course, Jess is asking himself why he wasn't with Leslie that morning and why he didn't insist that they find another way to cross the gully. Given that, it is an act of enormous generosity that Leslie's parents don't suggest blame, don't even ask the basic wheres and hows.

Would most of us be so generous? And would we accept a risk-taking child's death without pulling all the other children indoors? If Leslie's death isn't random, then it could have been prevented—couldn't it?

Experts increasingly caution that in shielding our kids from danger, we end up putting them at more serious risk by standing between them and the skills they need to become self-reliant. It's a crucial principle, especially as children's lives and play become more constricted. (How many 10-year-olds do you know who get to roam in the woods?) But the idea of letting kids wander freely is awfully hard to hold onto when you contemplate even the remote possibility of your child's death.

Bridge to Terabithia doesn't address any of these fears directly. Instead, in the last scene, Jess nails boards across the gully. Then he leads the younger sister who worships him "across the bridge—the great bridge to Terabithia." The movie nearly wrecks this moment by bursting into Disney fantasy. The screen goes technicolor as a friendly giant troll and hordes of wood fairies and creatures show up to greet the king and new princess. But no matter. The point is that the kids know how to keep on growing. And the parents leave them to it. Paterson's proper ending is for all of us.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Still from Bridge to Terabithia © Walden Media. All rights reserved.
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Remarks from the Fray:

What does self-reliance involve, specifically? The ability to spend a day alone in the woods without panicking? Wrestling a lion? Being able to pluck and cook a chicken on an open fire? Being able to change a lightbulb or paint the wall of your house? I know lots of very succesful, self-reliant, independent adults who have never done any of those things, and probably wouldn't be able to.

Isn't self-reliance for the middle classes really the ability to be hired at some desk job and sit there doing a cognitive-intellectual job for at least thirty years? How does releasing our children into the woods help with that? It doesn't. We do it anyway because it's FUN. If you want your kid to be self-reliant, keep him inside on the computer as much as possible.

--Caromer

(To reply, click here.)

Emily Bazelon (whose work I love) wrote: "The book's death focus goes too far for some people. Terabithia is ninth on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books."

I don't believe that's the chief reason this book is 9th on the "most challenged" list. In my experience, the vast majority of book-burning drives are led by religious bigots. They hate BtT because it's also the story of an atheist and a (not yet fully realized, but latent) religious conservative transcending that constructed divide which, in their innocence, they don't know "exists."

Leslie's parents are atheists, and Leslie does not believe in God. Jess is brought up in what is implied or stated to be a religious conservative family. Katherine Paterson is subtle in teasing out this thread of the theme, but it is powerful comment, artfully made.

--Homba

(To reply, click here.)

The book is different from the movie in many ways. Most of the fantasy imagining takes place to the side and none of the magical creatures featured in the move are ever even described. The book mostly stresses the impoverished life – financially and emotionally – of Jess Aarons and how Leslie Burke changes it utterly and forever.

Although Leslie is a crucial character, this is really Jess's story and Pearson has said that he is the character with which she most identifies. Leslie's death may have been "senseless and random," as Ms. Bazelon characterizes it, but the manner in which Jess is informed about it by his family is senseless bordering on cruelty. His sensitivity is not so much hostile to them as it is incomprehensible, with the exception of May Belle, the younger sister who adores him and shares many of his qualities and problems.

Jess is the character in the book into whose mind the reader is placed. Leslie remains more of an enigma. We come to adore her because she has so many admirable qualities and because Jess so clearly adores her.

At the end, as Jess grieves over her, we are told, "He thought about it all day, how before Leslie came, he had been a nothing – a stupid, weird little kid who drew funny pictures and chased around a cow field trying to act big – trying to hide a whole mob of foolish little fears running riot inside his gut."

The next line is central – "It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king." The bridge to Terabithia was never a rope swing. That was simply symbolic of the risk involved in crossing. The Bridge to Terabithia – at least for Jess – was Leslie (and, to a lesser extent, some of the adult characters in the book who really care about him).

As Bazelon's friend suggests, "death is always at the back of risk and beauty." Leslie's gift of watercolors and art pad to Jess at Christmas are secondary to her greater gift. By serving as the bridge to opening his own imagination, she forces him to take the risks necessary to transform himself from "a boy who draws" into an artist. This requires him to defy the strictures he and others have placed upon himself as qualifications to be a member of his family, his rural community, his congregation, a fifth grader, and a burgeoning man.

Certainly the book takes us through the stages of grieving with Jess with aplomb. However, it is how Jess ultimately chooses to create meaning out of Leslie's death that Pearson surely tries to convey what must come next for each of us.

Jess reflects, "Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn't there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength."

The thing that the Bridge to Terabithia teaches us about death is that journeys without endings have no more meaning than those without beginnings or direction. In the end, all of our bridges do burn behind us (or snap or wash away). It is only in the ability to keep moving that we survive and avoid being trapped in kingdoms, no matter how alluring they may seem.

However, Jess does more than simply keep moving. He stops along the way to honor Leslie's memory – first in a quiet funeral service among their sacred pine grove and then, more meaningfully, by emulating her. She had made him a king. "He had thought that was it. Wasn't king the best you could be?"

But a king safe in his kingdom is a little bit selfish. So Jess reaches out instead and becomes the one thing in life greater than a king. He becomes a bridge builder. The bridge he chooses to construct to Terabithia is different than that chosen by Leslie. It is more conventional, safer. But that is merely a reflection in the differences of their personalities. In choosing to share, he most becomes like Leslie.

Just as the girl he adored was his bridge, so he becomes the bridge for the girl who adores him – his little sister May Belle. For most of the novel, Jess is too tied up in his own loneliness and depravations to see that she suffers from the same things. In the end, he gives her the thing most precious to him to help her begin to overcome her own fears as he has learned to do.

While Leslie's death was tragic, it is the final lines of the novel that brought a tear to my eye. They acknowledge that we are defined as individuals as much by what we lose as what we gain. That in the journey of life, the quality of the journey is marked not only by our courage in crossing the bridges built for us by others but through our generosity of spirit in taking the time to build bridges of our own.

And when he finished, he put flowers in her hair and led her across the bridge – the great bridge into Terabithia – which might look to someone with no magic in him like a few planks across a nearly dry gully.

"Shhh," he said. "Look."

"Where?"

"Can't you see 'em?" he whispered. "All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you.

"Me?"

"Shhh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arriving today might be the queen they've been waiting for."

--The_Bell

(To reply, click here.)

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