The Line Between Certainty and Insanity Runs Thin

According to Stephen King, “…the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, and unrelenting sanity.” In other words, the line separating sanity, and hysteria runs thin within one’s psyche. Have you ever wondered how thin that line can run? Well, Louis Creed has crossed his line and back many times, in ways you wouldn’t expect. In Pet Sematary, Louis seems like a generic fellow who is starting to grow his roots into unfamiliar soil. He has a wife, two kids, a cat and a well paying job as a university doctor. Louis appears to have everything in his life, but his house of hopes and dreams for the future of his family begins to fall apart brick by brick. It began with the death of Church, the family cat, and really hit home with the death of Gage, Louis’s son. With the power of a mysterious burying ground that can bring pets back to life, Louis tries to play God in bringing back dead memories. With each visit to the brinks of the “Pet Semetary”, Louis leaves a part of himself until there is only a husk of the man he once was. Teenagers can relate to Louis in his battle against the pain and grief of losing someone. However, teenagers need to know that pain comes in many forms, and it trying to forget about it won’t make it go away; it needs to be faced and dealt with before it gets out of hand. 

          

As a wise man in Pet Sematary once said, “sometimes dead is better”. This was something Jud Crandall, a father figure to Louis, said to Louis Creed, hoping to steer him away from the alluring and evil power that lurked within the Pet Sematary. This advice is relevant to Louis Creed along with the readers, as it sheds light on a habit we all love to kick under the rug. Adults, as well as teenagers, try to bring back things that should stay dead. In other words, we try not to accept that something is no more. We can’t give life to something that is non-living, or find something that was never there in the first place. We have to learn from our mistakes and we have to learn from the reason why this thing, that we are so desperately trying to bring back, is dead; and move on. If Louis had realized this, most of his family would have still been alive, and Louis wouldn’t have lost sight of himself.

Although teenagers face similar pains that Louis has experienced, they shouldn’t try to bury their problems and issues, but rather deal with them before they snowball out of hand. For example, Louis decided that burying his grief would seal it away in a coffin of misery, never to be dug up again, however, it came back to life in a more evil form, bringing even more issues to the surface. Trying to revive Gage by bringing him into the Pet Sematary, and hiding this act from Louis’s family, was a flap of a wing in the butterfly effect that left his family in ruins. This was a crucial moment for Louis, as he showed signs of being “worn”. Louis wanted to back out of reviving Gage on many occasions, as he thought he wasn’t making the right decision, but an unearthly and evil power urged him onward. There was no longer a “Louis Creed” in the Louis Pet Semetary presents to the readers, as something was controlling his actions. In our lives, young adults can also feel worn or “puppeteered” as Louis had been. Overcoming this feeling is important however, as the strings connected to you, the strings that keep you together with yourself, can be cut.

According to Stephen King, “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier: a man grows what he can and tends to it.” This quote applies to not only the lives of teenagers, but to adults. The soil of someone’s heart is stony, and it’s hard to grow many things in stony soil. Whether you’re trying to plant the seed of a relationship, or the seed of your hopes and dreams, it may not become the healthy plant you planned for. If try to grow a plantation’s worth of plants in stony soil, you’ll end up with nothing. You grow what you can, and tend to it. Ultimately, you determine how much horror you can bear. You have to search for the power to grab the videotape of your pain, realize that sometimes it should be left alone, realizing that stashing this tape away won’t mean that you will forget about it, and destroy it. If you have nothing to hold you down, no roots to anchor you, then there will be nothing left to protect you from an inevitable insanity.