Violet Markey's grief over her bereavement

Violet Markey’s grief over Eleanor Markey’s death is at first marked by silence: she abandons the website they made together, cannot voice what happened, and experiences the crash site as proof that loss has become real. The grief also unsettles her relationships with her parents and her sense of what a future can hold. Over time, remembering Eleanor becomes more than revisiting the wound. Violet learns to speak her sister’s name, accept her own continuing life, and carry the dead with her without pretending that either loss is finished.

Silence and the Shared Website

Eleanor and Violet began EleanorandViolet.com after moving to Indiana, imagining an online magazine that would bring together their different perspectives on fashion, beauty, boys, books, and life. The site had found an audience: after Eleanor’s friend Gemma Sterling mentioned it in an interview, its following tripled. But after Eleanor died, Violet stopped updating it. She understood the website as a project about sisters, and the sister who had made it meaningful was gone. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, she felt that her words had died too. The abandoned site thus gives grief a practical form: a shared creation remains available, but Violet cannot yet enter it without confronting the absence at its center.

That silence returns in a conversation about Violet’s missed college application deadline. When the discussion turns to writing and the website, she refuses to talk about the site. Her difficulty is not simply a lack of a next assignment. Writing had belonged to the relationship she lost, and she cannot yet separate making something new from the fact that Eleanor is no longer there to make it with her.

The Crash Site and the Family’s Expectations

On a run, Violet takes a different route home over A Street Bridge, where the road connects downtown with the west side of Bartlett. She passes the damaged stone guardrail and the angry hole left in it. Beside the gap lies a cross, its white paint faded gray by Indiana weather. She wonders who placed it there, then descends to the dried-up riverbed below. Among cigarette butts, beer bottles, rocks, and dirt, she finds pieces of glass and metal, a red taillight eye, a shattered side mirror, and a dented license plate nearly folded in half. The wreckage turns the crash from an unbearable memory into physical evidence that she can encounter in the present. The cross and the scattered car parts make the bridge both a place of remembrance and a place where the violence of what happened remains visible.

At home, grief collides with her parents’ efforts to correct her behavior. Sheryl Markey says that she and James Markey are disappointed; James tells Violet that she cannot use losing her sister as an excuse to act out. Violet’s response reveals how much of her life has fallen away: she no longer cheers, has quit student council, struggles in orchestra, and feels she has no friends or boyfriend. She is also losing confidence in the one thing she had thought she could do. The Indiana wandering project is not something she initially wanted, but it has become one of the few things she still has going on. Her anger is therefore bound up with a fear that the world is proceeding without her while she cannot keep pace.

The family’s grief presses on Violet in another way when she leaves for college. Her parents cannot give Eleanor the farewell they never had the chance to give her, so the departure carries the weight of a missed freshman year and an absent daughter. Violet feels that she must make up for what her parents lost because she is all that remains. She redirects the moment by asking James about NYU’s history, but the question does not erase the expectation surrounding her. Her future is real, yet it arrives within a family still measuring time against the life Eleanor should have had.

Returning to the Road and to Memory

A year after the accident, Violet asks to drive her mother’s car to Shelby’s house. Sheryl gives her the keys, follows her down the sidewalk, and cries as she admits that her parents had not known whether they would ever see Violet drive again. Violet feels worse because she has not told her mother the whole reason for going. At first, she is shaky and repeatedly hits the brakes. Then she remembers Eleanor letting her drive home after she got her license and imagining Violet as her chauffeur. Looking toward the passenger seat, Violet can almost see Eleanor leaning against the door, knees under her chin, laughing or singing. The remembered passenger does not remove the fear, but it helps Violet continue: by the time she reaches Theodore Finch’s neighborhood, she is driving smoothly.

This return to driving is not a declaration that the accident has stopped mattering. Violet’s memory of Eleanor is vivid precisely because it accompanies an action that once seemed impossible. The passenger seat becomes a place where the sister’s trust can be remembered without claiming that Eleanor is physically present. Violet can carry that memory on the road and still make the journey herself.

Speaking the Names of the Dead

After Finch dies, Violet’s grief for Eleanor exists alongside a second bereavement. She searches Finch’s closet for something that might explain his disappearance, examines Finch’s Post-it Notes, and finds two lines of separated words on the wall. The search shows how loss can turn familiar objects into possible messages and how uncertainty can prolong the need to look. In the end, Violet does not treat remembrance as a puzzle that can restore either person. She returns to her parents and asks them to talk about Eleanor rather than forget that she existed.

Violet tells them that she misses her sister and remains troubled by the night of the accident, including her own suggestion that Eleanor take the bridge home. She says that neither Eleanor nor Finch can be brought back, and admits that she had secretly continued seeing Finch after telling her parents it was over. Her wish to stop tiptoeing around her parents, Eleanor, and Finch is inseparable from a fear that silence itself is making it harder to remember. She holds on to Eleanor’s characteristic greetings, recalling how Eleanor said “Hey there” when she was in a good mood and “Vi-o-let” when she was annoyed. These small sounds give memory particularity: Violet is not remembering an abstract lost sister, but the voice and habits of someone with whom she shared a life.

She also says plainly that she loved Finch, that he was good for her, and that thinking about him matters even though he is gone. Her parents do not instantly answer every part of what she says, but Sheryl draws her close and James tells her that nothing that happened is her fault. The exchange does not undo the losses or settle every feeling. It changes what can be spoken within the family: both the sister she misses and the boy her parents opposed can be remembered openly.

An Ongoing Life

Near the end, Violet writes an epitaph for Finch that imagines him continuing through the offerings and people he left behind. Under the open sky at Blue Hole, she treads water and thinks of Finch, as she now finds that everything reminds her of him. She considers her own unwritten epitaph and the places she will wander, and feels new capacities springing up in her. The scene holds grief and motion together: remembrance does not require Violet to remain fixed at the bridge or to treat survival as forgetting.

Her closing image also reframes the language of being rooted. Violet imagines herself no longer rooted, but gold and flowing. That change does not mean that Eleanor has become less important or that Finch’s death has been resolved. Rather, their continued place in her memory accompanies a life still capable of movement. Grief remains an active relationship with the people who are gone, while Violet begins to understand that she, too, is still here.