The Sixth Wife (pages 1-60)

Summary:

The book is narrated by Kate's best friend Cathy. The story begins by her explaining how Kate is now dead and she will not be attending her funeral. Katherine Parr was the wife of Henry VIII. She was one out of six of his wives who survived before being killed like the others. Cathy explains how she set up her funeral but she doesn't want to attend due to the pain she feels. Everything at Kate's funeral she took part of but she has decided that she's going to stay home to watch the new born child that Katherine had before her death. She believed that Thomas, Kate's former husband was the cause of her death. It seems as if she has a strong hate towards him because she explains how she knows that he won't be at the funeral and that she doesn't want to see his face. Also, it would be clear that if she blames her best friend’s death on him she would develop a hate towards him. She thought that Katherine should have stayed a widow and if she did, she wouldn't had any problems to deal with when she made the decision to marry Thomas. She then goes into how Kate met Thomas and when she found out about their marriage. It had been a month after Henry died when Kate told Cathy and of course she was shocked. She didn't understand how she could possibly have made such a huge decision in such a short period of time. She figured that they were close which played another part in the shock because Kate didn't tell anyone until after it was done and she wasn't giving much detail about how it all happened. Cathy became skeptical about Thomas because she wondered what was it that he could have possible seen in Katherine to make him want to marry her all of sudden. I say all of sudden because Cathy mentioned how before he became a married man, he had his eye on Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn who was barely a teenager at the time. Cathy described Thomas and Kate as fairly close friends so she expected that she would be the last one Thomas would decide to marry. She wasn't sure whether he wanted to be with Katherine because she was rich or did he truly have feelings for her. Ed Seymour, Thomas's brother found this funny as well.  Kate set up arrangements for Cathy and Thomas to meet. It had been some time since Cathy had last seen him and he was now forty but she said there wasn't much that changed about him. She felt that it was about time she'd see him now that he was married to her best friend.

Quote:

"With everyone at the chapel, the house was deserted and I'd never been so alone. It might have been that everyone had died. Everyone in the world, even, so that I could have walked from the house and kept walking but never found anyone again. Just kept walking until I, too, died. From starvation or exhaustion or perhaps sheer loneliness- can you die from loneness?"

Reflection:

When I'm reading, I usually look from passages that stand out to me besides the plot of the story. As a human, there have been times where I've felt lonely although it's not as much as Cathy seems to be feeling. When I came across this quote, it made me think could it possible that I could ever feel this way myself because I haven't been through an experience like this? Additionally, I understand Cathy's point of view on the decision Kate made because it doesn't seem like it was the right move to make after only a month of being a widow. It makes me think whether or not there was much thought put behind her decision or could it be that Kathy's just over analyzing the entire situation?