The barn scene is one of those iconic Walking Dead moments that sticks with reader long after this issue has been put down. It’s not just a gaggle of walkers streaming out of a barn and killing people. What makes this issue resonate so powerfully is the ideology that placed those walkers in the barn in the first place.

It’s easy to initially write off Hershel as completely unhinged when he admits to Rick that they keep their dead ones in the barn. But in just a few short panels and bits of dialogue later, one can completely understand (if not necessarily approve of) Hershel’s reasoning in keeping the walkers locked up. He points out quite factually that they have not the slightest idea what has caused the dead to rise. Therefore, the possibility—however remote it might be—exists that the zombies could potentially one day be cured somehow. If this is the case, then killing a zombie is on some level tantamount to murder.

However, as Rick points out, most of the walkers they encounter have suffered tremendous injuries, lost vital organs, and even have their guts visibly hanging out. He also makes a solid point that people always die before they turn. It’s not like people are fine one minute and then in the next minute lapse into a flesh-devouring mental state. There’s no doubt that in order for a person to become a walker, he or she must die. Therefore, if a person cannot be brought back from the dead before the zombie apocalypse, how can they be expected to after it? Dead is still dead, walking corpses or not.

Howecer, Hershel is unwilling to accept this bitter pill to swallow because it is his beloved son Shawn in that barn along with several other people he knows. We have perhaps in the barn episode one of the most visceral and poignant representations in literature of how devastating it can be when a man becomes lost in denial over the death of a loved one. His unwillingness to accept the loss of his son leads to the direct deaths of two more of his children Lacey and Arnold. Prolonged and unreconciled grief can have toxic effects on a person and those around them in the world we live in now. That toxicity only increases in the zombie apocalypse. An unwillingness to ever let go of those who pass means we may have to brace ourselves for other losses as well, which Hershel learns all too well. more