It Matters: Closure to Cold Cases

If we lived in a perfect world, there would always be happy endings where the main character finds exactly what they are looking for and discovered a way to solve all of their problems. In a perfect world, there would always be full closure. Sadly this is not the case for many people, and that is why one element that separates nonfiction stories from fairy-tales is having the character find only partial closure.

In Kite Runner Amir searches his whole life to find closure for an incident that happened when he was merely twelve years old. So, he goes back to his homeland and tries to find a way to somehow right all of his past wrongs. Then, he writes a whole memoir about his life in four days, reliving some of his most painful experiences, and still after all of that, Amir does not even seem to obtain the full closure that he was looking for.

Similarly, there was a recent article published about a girl named Kimberly Norwood from Texas who had disappeared over twenty years ago without a trace. Her family is still holding out hope that she will turn up even though there have been no legitimate suspects charged. The mother even says that Kimberly "will be" 34, and not "would be" because she refuses to believe that her daughter is dead.

This case of the missing girl says a lot about closure in real life. This is an instance where it is very likely that the mother will never have closure for her missing daughter, in any form. In fact, the mother believing that her daughter is still alive after over twenty years of being missing would be seen as downright wishful thinking. Why then, in stories is it so disappointing when the characters are left without closure? After all, in life there are many times where closure will never be found, shouldn't stories reflect that?

I believe that why people so often look for closure in their literature is because they want to find hope. People want to know that if they make a mistake or something terrible happens in their life, they will find some way to deal with it and move on. And sometimes this does occur, but many times either no closure or partial closure is the only option. In Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini may not have left the reader with the satisfying ending they were looking for, but if he had then the story would have been much less believable, because as we see in the story of Kimberly Norwood, we do not live in a perfect world.