Lara Jean holds a memorial for Stormy

Lara Jean holds a memorial for Stormy at Belleview, transforming a loss she cannot repair into a gathering where Stormy’s friends can hear and share her story. In a flowered dress Stormy once admired, Lara Jean speaks about the woman’s daring youth and the way she joined love with adventure; the service’s laughter, tears, music, and shared toast make remembrance both personal and communal.

Background and the Need to Remember

The memorial begins with the news that Stormy has died and the practical impossibility of attending her funeral in Rhode Island. The distance comes as a relief to Lara Jean, who has not been to a funeral since her mother died. She was nine then; Margot was eleven and Kitty was two. Her clearest memory is of sitting beside her father as he silently cried, with Kitty in his arms and his tears wetting the little girl’s cheeks. Kitty kept telling him not to cry, while he tried to smile. For Lara Jean, the day marked the frightening realization that nothing felt safe anymore. Stormy’s death brings that old grief close again: Lara Jean cries for Stormy, for her mother, and for everything the losses gather up.

Her memories of her mother are intimate and ordinary rather than ceremonial. After baths, she sat cross-legged while her mother combed the tangles from her hair; when Margot went to piano lessons, mother and daughter sometimes shared secret ice-cream sundaes in a McDonald’s parking lot. Lara Jean remembers the caramel and strawberry sauce, and how her mother gave her the peanuts she liked. These small recollections help explain why the loss of Stormy resonates with an earlier bereavement: remembering someone means holding on to the ordinary gestures that made that person present.

Stormy had wanted Lara Jean to transcribe her memoirs, which she planned to call Stormy Weather, but they never got around to it. Now Lara Jean wonders how people will know Stormy’s story. The uncompleted book gives the memorial a particular urgency: although the written memoir will not be made, Lara Jean can still tell one story aloud, and the residents who knew Stormy can add their own memories.

Planning the Belleview Gathering

Lara Jean turns to Margot the morning after hearing the news. They cry together over the phone, 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—especially useful because those friends cannot travel to the funeral. Margot wishes she could attend; Lara Jean wishes the same and says she always feels stronger with her sister beside her. Margot points out that Peter will be there.

Before school, Lara Jean calls her former boss Janette at Belleview with the idea. Janette agrees immediately, and they set the service for Thursday afternoon, before bingo. The timing places the memorial within the nursing home’s ordinary life rather than apart from it: the residents and staff can gather where Stormy lived, among people who knew her.

Lara Jean chooses not to wear black. Instead, she wears a white sundress embroidered with cornflower-blue forget-me-nots, with short puffed sleeves and a fitted waist. Stormy had once said Lara Jean looked like a girl in an Italian movie in that dress. Lara Jean adds white sandals bought for graduation and delicate white gloves found at Bygones, a vintage shop in Richmond; the gloves make her imagine Stormy at one of her cotillions or Saturday-night dances. She deliberately leaves Stormy’s pink diamond ring unworn, saving it for prom, when she believes Stormy would have wanted her to wear it.

The room’s details turn preparation into a tribute. Lara Jean brings out a crystal punch bowl, a bowl of peanuts, cherry-embroidered cocktail napkins bought at an estate sale, and the family tablecloth used at Thanksgiving. She places roses on the piano where Stormy used to sit. The punch combines ginger ale and frozen fruit juice, without alcohol because some residents’ medications prevent them from drinking it; a bottle of champagne sits beside it for anyone who wants to add a little. Lara Jean also plays Frank Sinatra, whom Stormy used to say should have been her second husband. The food, objects, and music recall Stormy’s tastes while accommodating the people gathered to honor her.

The Memorial and Stormy’s Story

Only a small group files in. A nurse wheels in Mrs. Armbruster, who has dementia and once was friendly with Stormy; Mr. Perelli, Alicia, receptionist Shanice, and Janette also attend. Lara Jean recognizes that Belleview has changed while she was away: residents have moved in with their children or died, and fewer familiar staff members remain. The memorial is therefore a reunion with a community already altered by time, as well as a farewell to Stormy.

Standing at the front of the room, Lara Jean is afraid of stumbling and failing to do Stormy justice. Her knees shake beneath her skirt. Just as she is about to speak, John Ambrose McClaren arrives from Rhode Island, dressed in a pressed button-down shirt and khakis. He sits beside Alicia and gives Lara Jean an encouraging smile. His arrival matters because he is Stormy’s grandson, and because Lara Jean has not seen him since her birthday nearly a year earlier; they were never quite a couple, but nearly were. In this moment, however, his quiet encouragement helps her face the room.

Lara Jean begins her speech with the summer of 1952. Stormy was eighteen, in the marching band, voted Best Legs, and accustomed to having a Saturday-night date. On one particular date, with a boy named Walt, she went skinny-dipping in the town lake on a dare. Stormy, Lara Jean says, could never turn down a dare. Mr. Perelli laughs in recognition, and others agree. When Lara Jean recounts how a farmer called the police and Stormy refused to leave the lake until the officers turned their lights away, the residents add that the police-car ride home was not the first or last. Their responses turn the speech from a solitary account into a shared portrait: Stormy’s friends confirm the stories with their own knowledge.

The memory of the lake gives Lara Jean a way to describe the force of Stormy’s whole life. She says Stormy lived more in one night than most people do in a lifetime, then falters as her eyes fill. Starting again, she identifies the lesson Stormy taught her: love means making brave choices every day. Stormy chose both love and adventure, and treated them as inseparable. Lara Jean closes by imagining Stormy setting off on a new adventure and wishing her well. The speech does not erase the loss; it gives the loss words that the people present can recognize and share.

Music, Toast, and Aftermath

After the speech, Lara Jean nods to Janette, who starts the stereo. “Stormy Weather” fills the room, bringing Stormy’s own name into the music that accompanies the gathering. The song follows the spoken remembrance rather than replacing it: first the residents hear Lara Jean’s account, then they share a piece of music tied to the person being remembered.

Afterward, John makes his way over with two plastic cups of fruit punch. He observes that Stormy would probably have told them to spike it, then raises a cup to Edith Sinclair McClaren Sheehan, the formal name behind the nickname Stormy. Lara Jean reacts with surprise that Stormy’s real name sounds so serious, more like someone who wears wool skirts and heavy stockings and drinks chamomile tea than someone who drank cocktails. John laughs in agreement. Their exchange brings affectionate humor back into the room and honors the contrast between Stormy’s proper name and the exuberant character Lara Jean remembers.

The service answers Lara Jean’s fear that Stormy’s story might disappear by giving it a public voice, a setting, and witnesses. The memoir remains unwritten, but her speech, the residents’ recognition, the Sinatra music, and the toast preserve pieces of Stormy in a form shared among those who knew her. The memorial also links two experiences of mourning in Lara Jean’s life: the childhood memory of her mother’s death and the present loss of Stormy. Rather than presenting remembrance as a clean recovery, the scene shows how grief returns alongside old memories—and how telling someone’s story can make room for both sorrow and laughter.