Stormy's Memorial at Belleview

Stormy's Memorial at Belleview gives Lara Jean a way to mourn Stormy when distance keeps her from the funeral, and turns private grief into a shared act of remembrance. With a white sundress, familiar music, punch, and a story about Stormy's youthful defiance, Lara Jean offers the residents more than a substitute ceremony: she gives Stormy's friends a place to remember her, and herself the chance to say a proper goodbye.

Causes and Arrangements

Stormy's funeral is in Rhode Island, too far away for Lara Jean to attend. The distance makes the loss press against an earlier grief: the last funeral she attended was her mother's, when Lara Jean was nine, Margot was eleven, and Kitty was two. Her sharpest memory is of sitting beside her father as he cried silently, with Kitty in his arms and tears on Kitty's cheeks. Kitty kept asking him not to cry; his attempted smile seemed to Lara Jean to melt. Stormy's death brings that feeling of lost safety back, and Lara Jean cries for Stormy, for her mother, and for everything bound up in the two losses.

Stormy had wanted Lara Jean to transcribe her memoirs, to be called Stormy Weather, but they never got around to it. In her grief, Lara Jean worries that without the memoir, people will not know Stormy's story. The unfinished project gives the memorial an additional purpose: not simply to mark a death, but to speak aloud what Stormy had wanted to preserve.

Lara Jean calls Margot the morning after learning the news. They cry together, and Margot suggests a memorial at Belleview where Lara Jean can say a few words, serve cookies, and invite Stormy's friends to share memories. Margot cannot attend, but she knows Lara Jean feels stronger with her beside her, and reassures her that Peter will be there. Before leaving for school, Lara Jean calls her former boss Janette at Belleview, who readily agrees to hold the gathering on Thursday afternoon, before bingo. Peter has another commitment: Days on the Lawn at UVA with his mother. Though he offers to skip it for the memorial, Lara Jean tells him that the offer itself is what counts.

A Farewell Made of Familiar Things

Rather than wear black, Lara Jean chooses a white sundress embroidered with cornflower-blue forget-me-nots, a dress Stormy had once praised. She had worn it only once before, when she stopped at Belleview on her way to meet Peter at the movies; Stormy said she looked like a girl in an Italian movie. Lara Jean pairs it with white graduation sandals and lacy white gloves found at a vintage store in Richmond. The gloves let her imagine Stormy wearing them to a cotillion or Saturday-night dance. She leaves Stormy's pink diamond ring unworn, saving it for prom, as she believes Stormy would have wanted.

The room is arranged through objects and tastes that recall the person being honored. Lara Jean brings out a crystal punch bowl, a bowl of peanuts, cherry-embroidered cocktail napkins from an estate sale, and the tablecloth used for Thanksgiving. She places roses on the piano where Stormy used to sit. The punch is made with ginger ale and frozen fruit juice; because some residents' medications prevent them from drinking alcohol, Lara Jean keeps it nonalcoholic, but puts champagne nearby for anyone who wants to add some. She plays Frank Sinatra, whom Stormy used to say should have been her second husband.

The guests make up a small gathering of people who knew Stormy at Belleview: Mr. Perelli, Alicia, Shanice from reception, Janette, and Mrs. Armbruster, whom a nurse wheels in. Mrs. Armbruster has dementia and knits while staring into space; others look on expectantly as Lara Jean prepares to speak. The room also makes change visible. Fewer familiar residents remain than Lara Jean remembers: some have moved in with their children, some have died, and the staff has changed too. Belleview itself has changed while she was away, even as the memorial gathers the people who are still there around a shared memory.

John Ambrose McClaren has said he will come if he can return from Rhode Island in time. Lara Jean feels nervous because she has not seen him since almost exactly a year earlier, on her birthday. They were never quite a couple, but had almost been one, a near-relationship that still matters to her. As she stands at the front of the room, worried that she will stumble and fail to do Stormy justice, John arrives in a pressed button-down shirt and khakis. He sits beside Alicia and gives Lara Jean an encouraging smile. His arrival steadies the moment without taking its focus away from Stormy.

Stormy's Story, Told Aloud

Lara Jean begins with a scene from 1952. Stormy is eighteen, in the marching band, voted Best Legs, and accustomed to a Saturday-night date. On this particular night she is out with a boy named Walt. After accepting a dare, she goes skinny-dipping in the town lake. When a farmer calls the police and officers shine their lights on the water, Stormy refuses to come out until they turn around. She gets a ride home in a police car.

The residents do not receive the story as distant biography. Mr. Perelli laughs at the reminder that Stormy could never turn down a dare, and others agree; someone adds that the police car was not the first such ride or the last. Their recognition and laughter relax Lara Jean's shoulders. In the memorial, telling is collaborative: Lara Jean supplies the episode, and the people who knew Stormy answer it with memories of the person behind it.

The story also gives Lara Jean a way to say what she learned from Stormy. She calls Stormy a force of nature who lived more life in one night than most people do in a lifetime. When tears interrupt her, she starts the thought again and makes the lesson explicit: Stormy taught her that love means making brave choices every day. Stormy always chose love and adventure, Lara Jean says, and treated the two as one and the same. She closes by imagining Stormy setting out on a new adventure and wishing her well. The speech turns a life recalled in comic detail into a principle for how to live, without pretending that the loss itself has disappeared.

After the speech, Janette starts Stormy Weather, and Sinatra's song fills the room. Later, John brings Lara Jean two plastic cups of fruit punch. He remarks that Stormy would surely have wanted it spiked, then raises a toast to Edith Sinclair McClaren Sheehan, better known as Stormy. Lara Jean is surprised by Stormy's formal given name, which she finds at odds with the image of a woman who drank cocktails. The exchange lets affection and humor sit beside the solemnity of the occasion.

After the Memorial

Lara Jean stays much longer than she expected. Someone brings out old records, the guests begin dancing, and Mr. Perelli insists on teaching her the rumba despite his bad hip. When Janette plays Glenn Miller's In the Mood, Lara Jean and John meet eyes and share a secret smile, remembering the USO party. Their shared memory briefly brings their almost-romance into the room, but as an echo within a gathering devoted to Stormy rather than as its center.

Lara Jean is surprised to feel happy at a memorial for someone she loved. The happiness comes from the day going well and from having sent Stormy off in style; she has had a chance to say a proper goodbye. The party does not undo grief or recover the memoir that was never written. Instead, speaking, listening, music, and dancing give Stormy's story a living audience.

The memorial's farewell also resonates with the changes surrounding Lara Jean. She has already reflected on memories of her mother as small, soft moments—a bath followed by hair-combing, or secret sundaes with caramel, strawberry sauce, and extra peanuts in a McDonald's parking lot. At Belleview, another kind of remembrance is made public, with Stormy's friends helping to sustain what Lara Jean fears might otherwise be lost. Later, the thought of one last dance at the end of high school carries a different farewell: the summer remains ahead, but Lara Jean and Peter will not again be together in exactly the same way. Against these transitions, the memorial stands as a particular kind of ending: not the end of attachment, but a communal pause in which memory can be told, answered, and carried forward.