Violet's grief and trauma after losing Eleanor

Violet's grief and trauma after losing Eleanor shape how she remembers the accident, inhabits daily life, and imagines a future. The loss reaches beyond sadness: it disrupts her writing and plans, returns in dreams and physical reactions, and leaves her feeling responsible for a choice that cannot be undone. Her movement toward life does not require leaving Eleanor behind. It begins when Violet can speak openly about both her sister and Theodore Finch, and accept memory as a continuing bond rather than a betrayal of the living.

The Loss and Its Delayed Returns

Violet’s distress is closely tied to Eleanor’s death in the accident. The nightmares begin about a month later, and Violet’s mother passes the information to Mrs. Marion Kresney, the school counselor. After Violet mentions the dreams to her mother, Mrs. Marion Kresney asks about them at every meeting. Violet consequently stops telling her mother things, while telling the counselor that she is sleeping well and has no bad dreams. The difference between what she reports and what she experiences establishes silence as part of her response to grief.

One remembered dream casts that grief as gradual disappearance: Violet dreams that she is melting away, while her father tells her she has reached her limit. She remembers the dream in detail, although she has stopped writing her dreams down. In another recurring nightmare, an unseen figure approaches from behind and tries to strangle her. She sometimes wakes uncertain where she is, turns on a light, and checks her room. The dreams return at night, but their effects reach into waking life: fear, disorientation, and the sense that ordinary surroundings may not be secure.

The accident also reshapes Violet’s plans. Since the summer before seventh grade, she had imagined studying creative writing at NYU. A visit to New York City with her mother, a college professor and writer, had made that ambition vivid: the family stayed for three weeks and met her mother’s former teachers and classmates, including writers across several forms. Violet had planned to apply early, but after the accident she changed her mind. Although she completed the application and essay, she missed the regular deadline by one week. The abandoned application makes grief visible as a narrowing of possibility, not only a memory of what happened.

Objects, Habits, and Interrupted Expression

Eleanor remains present in the objects and projects they shared. The sisters created EleanorandViolet.com after moving to Indiana, an online magazine about fashion, beauty, boys, books, and life that offered their contrasting perspectives. After a mention by Gemma Sterling, a star of the web series Rant, their following tripled. Violet stops updating the site after Eleanor dies. Because it was built around sisterhood, its silence registers as the loss of a shared voice; Violet also feels that her own words died in the accident.

That sense of interruption returns when Violet tries to write. Before the accident, writing could help her get thoughts onto a page. Afterward, she opens a document, writes a few words, and erases them. Continuing to write feels, to her, like cheating on Eleanor, as though being alive and experiencing new moments were a disloyalty. The block therefore joins two losses: the sister who is absent and the former version of Violet who wrote without this burden.

Eleanor’s glasses become another means of reaching toward her. In class, Violet wears them despite thinking they do not suit her, and hopes that wearing them might let her see what Eleanor saw. She imagines becoming both sisters at once so that no one, especially herself, would have to miss Eleanor. This wish does not resolve the separation; it gives Violet a tangible way to express how difficult it is to experience herself as wholly separate from her sister.

Guilt, Avoidance, and the Body’s Reminders

Violet’s guilt persists beneath her denials. When Mrs. Marion Kresney asks whether she feels responsible for what happened, Violet says no, though she recognizes that she is lying. Her uneven bangs become, in her own thoughts, a form of punishment she has imposed on herself. The counselor’s concern that Violet is not progressing and cannot avoid cars forever meets resistance when she calls Violet a survivor. Violet gets up and leaves before hearing the rest. The label does not match the inward experience of someone still caught in blame and unable to accept a ready-made account of recovery.

The A Street Bridge gives that blame a physical location. Theodore Finch runs beneath the bridge past the damaged stone guardrail, a cross placed beside the gap, and fragments from the crash below. He finds evidence that makes the accident newly real to him. For Violet, the bridge is also bound to the choice she later confesses: she suggested that Eleanor take that route home. This detail does not make Violet responsible for the accident, but it explains the particular shape of her self-accusation, which survives even when she cannot change what happened.

Sound and social settings can bring the loss back abruptly. At a party, the music, lights, and shouting recall the last party Violet attended, on April 4, the night Eleanor died. Violet becomes sick and leaves, then apologizes to Amanda Monk by text. When Ryan Cross tries to kiss her, Violet turns her head. The scene sets public expectations of the familiar, smiling Violet against the private disorder she says others do not see. Even a later conversation about a possible trip to New York, including a stop at NYU, fails to give her uncomplicated pleasure; the same night, the recurring nightmare returns.

Her grief is not constant in the same way. Violet describes good days as well as bad ones: a television show, a joke from her father, or a comment in class may make her laugh; some mornings she sings or dances while getting ready. She sometimes walks to school or rides her bicycle and briefly feels ordinary. These moments do not cancel the trauma. Their importance lies in the contrast: grief remains real without occupying every instant, even while Violet feels uneasy about admitting that she can still have good days.

Speaking, Remembering, and Continuing

For much of the story Violet tries to become quiet and unobtrusive, partly because she does not want to add to her family’s burdens. That habit also makes it harder for her to tell the truth about Eleanor and her own needs. Her final conversation with her parents reverses that pattern. She asks them not to act as though Eleanor never existed and acknowledges that she misses her, cannot believe she is alive while Eleanor is not, and feels sorry for having suggested the bridge route. She also tells them she secretly continued seeing Theodore Finch after saying she had stopped.

Violet insists that remembering is a choice the family can make together. She recalls Eleanor’s distinct ways of greeting her, including the different tone Eleanor used when pleased or annoyed, and describes concentrating on those sounds so they will not disappear from memory. She tells her parents that she loved Theodore Finch, that he was good for her, and that thinking of him matters too. Her account holds pain and affection together rather than making one cancel the other. She also admits uncertainty about whether the losses might have been her fault, exposing the guilt she had previously concealed.

Her mother responds by drawing her close and telling her that nothing that happened was Violet’s fault. The reassurance does not reverse either death, but it offers Violet support in the moment she has finally made her grief speakable. Later, in the water beneath an open sky, Violet thinks of Theodore Finch, imagines her own unwritten epitaph, and feels new capacities opening. The movement is not a declaration that Eleanor has been forgotten or that trauma is finished. It is a change in what memory permits: Violet can carry the dead with her while imagining places still to go.

Significance

Violet’s grief is represented through recurrence and interruption: dreams return, applications go unsent, the shared website lies untouched, and the bridge remains charged with an irreversible decision. Alongside these repetitions, the narrative records small fluctuations—a laugh, a morning song, a conversation finally spoken aloud—that resist the idea that grief is a single, steady condition. Eleanor’s glasses, the sisters’ website, and the remembered sound of Eleanor’s voice let absence take material and verbal form.

The ending reframes remembrance as neither erasure nor surrender to guilt. Violet asks her family to keep Eleanor present in their shared account of the past, and openly acknowledges her love for Theodore Finch as another bond that death has not made meaningless. Her emerging future depends on no simple recovery formula; it begins with telling the truth, receiving comfort, and accepting that continuing to live need not mean leaving the people she has lost behind.