“Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard.”

These were the last words said at the end of chapter 10 of All Quiet on the Western Front. A chapter all about Paul, the protagonist, losing his best friend, Albert Kropp, to a leg injury. This scene (and whole chapter) play upon themes of loss, and having to accept people in life are gone.

But why is it so hard for us to do that? Every day we lose things, but it truly never gets any easier. So that begs the question for everyone.

Why is it so hard to move on?

There are many reasons why we have a hard time letting go of people we know. Paul is an excellent example of not wanting to lose people. In chapters 10 & 11, every single person Paul knew up until this point is killed off in several different fights, all culminating in his mentor and friend, Kat. When Kat is killed, Paul  immediately enters a state of denial, refusing to believe that he was killed. In this instance, you could say the refusal to move on is a sort of coping mechanism, to help comprehend the fact that his friends are gone.

Another great example of this is from a video game series I’m a huge fan of, Telltale’s The Walking Dead. In this series, the main protagonist, Clementine, meets several survivor groups from the zombie outbreak. However, every last one of them falls apart after a while, always leaving Clementine alone. However, two things about Clementine shows her struggle of moving on from the people she loved most. The first is her hat, gifted to her by her father who died in the first days of the outbreak, and the second is her repeated dreams of her caretaker, Lee, who was bitten by a walker (zombie) and got infected. Both of these are shown to make Clementine happy, so it’s apparent that her not being able to move on is a form of defense she uses to keep herself happy.

Both examples I used here should give an answer to my question. The reason it’s so hard to move on is because it’s safer for us. Whether it’s denial, or comfort, we all would prefer to be in a safe place where the bad things that happened can be ignored. It may be hard to move on, but is it really a bad thing we don’t?