Tessa’s grief after her father’s death

Tessa’s grief after her father’s death is not a steady movement from pain toward closure. It begins with the shock of finding Richard Young dead, leaves her caught between numbness and anger, and later changes shape as she can remember him with humor as well as sorrow. The narrative makes grief visible in its abrupt sensory returns, its collisions with other disappointments, and the gradual recovery of memories that do not reduce her father to the circumstances of his death.

Discovery and Traumatic Aftermath

Tessa encounters the death before she can understand it. In the bathroom, her foot catches on something; when she turns on the light, she sees a body on the floor and struggles to focus. Her first fear is that it might be the boy who left her. When her eyes adjust, she recognizes that it is not him, but the relief is only partial: her father is the person lying still at her feet. The scene turns a routine movement through the house into a sudden confrontation with death.

Paramedics and police officers make the discovery official. Richard died alone in the apartment, from pushing a needle into his vein, and had been dead for hours when Tessa found him. Bags of heroin in his jeans suggest that he had brought the drugs for the weekend; the account also emphasizes that he knew using them carried a risk, even if he did not know he would die that day. His pale face remains with Tessa as an image like a mask. She associates the apartment’s brick wall and bookshelves with a deceptive prettiness that concealed what she experiences as evil. In the immediate aftermath, she imagines that crossing its threshold cost her everything, connecting her father’s death to the painful history of her relationship with Hardin.

The bodily details of the discovery return with particular force. Tessa remembers crying her father’s name and shaking him so hard that his jaw fell open and the needle dropped from his arm with a small clink. The sound persists in her mind as both ordinary and horrific. She also remembers his hand jerking in hers, but cannot decide whether this was an involuntary spasm or a false hope produced by her mind. Checking his pulse and finding nothing ends that brief uncertainty. The narrative’s close first-person perspective does not smooth these impressions into a composed account: uncertainty, repetition, and sensory fragments show how the event continues to occupy her awareness.

Numbness, Anger, and Contradictory Feelings

In the days after the death, Tessa sits on the floor of an oversized living room with her knees held to her chest, staring at the wall. Attempts to coax her into moving become less frequent as the sun goes down, until she is left alone. She describes her thinking as no longer rational and herself as unable to process what has happened. The death is confirmed by others, but confirmation cannot make the scene feel assimilated or finished.

Anger becomes easier to bear than the emptiness that follows the shock. Walking with Zed, Tessa asks whether it is wrong to feel angry at her father for dying. She recognizes that the anger distracts her from feeling nothing, even as she feels guilty for having it. Zed suggests that Richard may not have understood what he was doing. Tessa distinguishes between not knowing that death would come and knowing that heroin could bring that possibility: in her view, Richard brought drugs into the apartment because he wanted to get high, without thinking of those who would be affected. Her anger does not erase her love for him; she says she needs to be truthful and to let the feelings out. The conversation gives her grief a form that is painful but more articulate than silence.

Grief amid Other Losses

Tessa’s mourning is repeatedly entangled with her unstable relationship with Hardin. In one aftermath of their intimacy, she sees their relationship as a loop of happiness, lust, passion, love, and pain, with pain seeming to prevail. Hardin can make her laugh and cry, and has helped her feel again after she believed she was trapped in inner nothingness. Yet she fears that returning to him will expose her to another withdrawal and another hurt. After he leaves, she dresses and puts on Landon’s sweatshirt so she will not be there when Hardin returns. The moment does not resolve her grief; it shows how the desire for relief and connection can coexist with the expectation of being wounded again.

Her father’s death also coincides with an upheaval in her imagined future. After learning that she may not be able to get pregnant, Tessa calls Hardin but reaches his voicemail three times. She then tells herself she can manage on her own and tries to file the news away. The drive back to Kimberly’s is marked by frustration with traffic, rain, and the effort to remain positive. Most painfully, Tessa experiences the diagnosis as her body betraying her in an intimate and final way. She thinks of her mother and the traits she believes she has inherited, wants to assign blame, and recognizes that she cannot simply do so. In her despair, the possibility of a future with Hardin and the possibility of having children collapse into a single imagined loss. These feelings sharpen the grief surrounding her father without making that grief identical to either her relationship pain or her fertility fears.

Support and the Struggle to Continue

Kimberly recognizes that Tessa is struggling and reaches across the counter to place a hand over hers. She apologizes for not calling more often, while Tessa admits she might not have been able to answer. Her attempt to laugh sounds false even to her. Their exchange acknowledges that support can arrive imperfectly: Kimberly has been occupied by her own crisis, but now attends to Tessa’s appearance and emotional state rather than accepting her reassurances at face value.

Kimberly tells Tessa that sadness is permissible but warns against letting it govern the rest of her life. She reminds her that she is moving to New York and encourages her to approach that change as something to anticipate, not merely endure. Tessa can see the point without being able to act on it. She describes being angry and sad at once, unable to separate the pain, and afraid it is taking over her mind. Nor does she claim an immediate recovery: she worries that she may never feel like herself again, while leaving open the possibility that she might one day. The exchange frames independence not as the absence of grief but as a difficult future she cannot yet confidently imagine.

When Tessa receives the fertility news, her attempt to call Hardin and subsequent decision to put her phone away echo that struggle. She insists that she does not need him or anyone at that moment and can handle the information on her own. This is less a settled declaration of healing than an effort to contain the next blow without waiting for someone else to answer. Her thought that every plan has fallen through links the news to the losses already surrounding her, while also showing that she is still trying to make choices for herself.

Memory and a Continuing Connection

Later, a mundane exchange over Frosted Flakes brings back a memory of Richard arguing with Hardin for eating Hardin’s cereal. Tessa smiles and keeps the memory. She no longer thinks of her father only with pain in her chest; she can appreciate the humor he had and the positivity he showed during the short time she knew him. The cereal, trivial in itself, restores a domestic and comic version of Richard that the bathroom scene and the apartment’s drug use cannot contain.

This change does not mean that Tessa forgets how he died or that every hurt has disappeared. Rather, remembrance becomes less dominated by the final image. The contrast between the needle’s clink, which continues to echo inside her mind, and the remembered argument over cereal marks a change in what her memories can hold. Her grief moves from shock and self-reproach toward a more complex bond in which anger, love, humor, and admiration can coexist. Richard remains part of her inner life, but he is no longer present only as the body she found or the loss she cannot escape.