Thinking about Robby being abandoned by his mother at eight years old feels like the starting point of him learning to live with grief. That kind of abandonment, especially from a mother, who is often the primary source of reassurance and affection for a child, would be so defining during his formative years.
It likely started a cycle of grief that followed him throughout his life. So much of Robby’s existence is shaped by loss: grief for himself, for the people he couldn’t save, and even for the life and family he never got to have. On some level, he seems to realize that he hasn’t been able to move past that feeling, he’s been living in it, stuck there in that in moment, as an eight-year-old boy watching his mother walk through a door she’d never come back through.
