No, I'm not comparing Lois to Ophelia. I'm comparing her to Yorick, the court jester whose skull Hamlet finds in the churchyard. This is what Hamlet says when he holds Yorick's skull in his hands:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? (Hamlet, V.i)
As you can see, Hamlet says that he used to kiss Yorick's lips when he, Hamlet, was a small child.
This is a painting of the small child Hamlet with Yorick:
![[Linked Image]](http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Calderon.Hamlet.jpg)
Hamlet clearly loved Yorick when he was a child. And Clark loves Lois when they are both adults. But if Lois were to die, Clark might contemplate her skull in the same way that Hamlet contemplates Yorick's. The point I was trying to make is that I think that the Lois deathfics rarely consider the full tragedy of Lois's (premature) death. Often I find those deathfics too neat and clean, too sweetly sad in a romantic way, where the focus is on Clark's broken heart:
![[Linked Image]](http://www.werbeka.com/ffha/keno09.jpg)
The true physical horror of
death, of decay, of the horrible transformation of the vibrant young Lois into a rotting corpse, is rarely in them. Actually considering
Lois's dead body, her fleshless skull, brings home the message of her death in a special way. At least I think so.
Ann
