Mattie Devore and Lance

Mattie Devore and Lance are joined in the novel’s retrospective account by a bond whose continuing force is measured through grief. Mattie later recalls that she had not cried with such abandon since Lance died, making his death the emotional reference point against which she recognizes her own renewed vulnerability.

Grief as a Measure of Loss

When Mattie breaks down in a telephone conversation, she apologizes and explains that she has not cried so intensely since Lance’s death. Her recollection makes the earlier bereavement more than background: it establishes how long she has held her grief in check and how unusually exposed she feels in the present. The memory of Lance remains available to her not as a detailed account of their life together, but as the measure of a loss that had once opened the floodgates.

Lance’s Continuing Place in Mattie’s Life

The evidence supplies no account of how Lance died or of the circumstances of their marriage, so the relationship is best understood through what Mattie herself remembers: his death remains the last occasion she can identify with such profound crying. That comparison gives the past an active place in her present. Her tears return in a later crisis, and naming Lance’s death helps her express the scale of feeling she has just experienced.

Narrative Significance

The recollection links bereavement to the novel’s wider attention to grief as something that can persist beneath ordinary life and surface again under pressure. Mattie’s brief statement makes Lance’s absence legible through its lasting emotional consequence, while also showing that the return of intense grief does not erase the years between losses. It marks the depth of her distress in the present by recalling the earlier death that had set its strongest precedent.