She does not recall her own father when he greets her, and the stones explain that “Father is
not a word that dead people understand.”27 Without parents, memories, or human bonds, the
dead cannot understand the living, and thus they lose their humanity. Al-Shamma interprets the
representation of life and death in this play “as a continuum, along which Orpheus represents the
living, Eurydice the newly-dead, her father the recently dead, and the Stones, the contented and
long-dead.”28 The Stones’ distance from humanity is displayed in their lack of individuality;
they speak in unison, finish each others sentences, and dully recite the rules of this afterlife
where fathers do not exist and “[b]eing sad is not allowed!”29 Eurydice clings to humanity with
the help of her father, who slowly rebuilds her knowledge of herself and the world of the living,
but when he dips himself in the river and abandons her, she loses her last link to other human
beings. She writes a final letter to Orpheus and then Ruhl describes how “She dips herself in the
River./A small metallic sound of forgetfulness—ping” as she surrenders her identity.30 The loss of
memory takes the humanity from all three characters, the Father, Eurydice, and Orpheus, and the
play ends with silence and isolation rather than connection.31 The characters can no longer relate
to each other and will become like the Stones who forgot themselves and their humanity long
ago. Ruhl warns against forgetting each other, even to escape grief, because forgetting the
people that make up one’s past can lead to a loss of self.