Ava's Grief

Ava Spirini’s grief for Kelly Waititi is not a single response to a past loss but a continuing presence that reshapes her school days, her relationships, and her sense of the future. The novel follows grief as anger and numbness, as returning memories and difficult choices, and finally as something Ava can carry while still moving forward. Her changing understanding does not erase Kelly’s absence; it makes room for a continuing bond with her.

Disruption of ordinary life

Ava returns to school after Kelly’s death reluctantly: she has attended part-time for several weeks and has been back full-time for only a month. Mrs Bryan and the other teachers are concerned about Year 11 work, while Ava’s father can no longer keep school at bay. To Ava, the days blur into missed work, absence, and difficulty paying attention. Other people’s attempts to compare her loss with their own bereavements deepen her isolation. She feels that they cannot understand the difference between losing a relative or pet and losing Kelly, her best friend, and she does not want to explain a pain for which she has no adequate words.

The change is also temporal. Six months after Kelly’s death, Ava feels that life has slowed and that time itself stopped with Kelly. She resents the expectation that she should already be recovering, interpreting other people’s frustration as anger at both her and Kelly. The shortness of six months, set against Ava’s fear that she will feel this way for the rest of her life, captures how grief can make the future seem both distant and permanently fixed.

Ava’s grief becomes especially legible in the difference between the language she was taught and the feeling she now experiences. Her father disliked the word hate, teaching her to reserve it for an intensity far beyond ordinary dislike. After Kelly dies, Ava finds herself hating what Kelly did and feeling that Kelly has left her alone. That anger does not cancel her love: it shows the strain of loving someone who is no longer there, while being unable to make the loss feel fair or comprehensible.

The news and the rituals of loss

Ava remembers the morning her father told her Kelly had died with exact attention to time. Kelly’s and Lincoln’s father called the house phone at 5:37 a.m.; seven minutes later, Ava’s father came into her room. His tearful expression makes her expect that something has happened to her grandparents. Instead, he tells her that Kelly is dead. Ava recalls the news as a rupture in her life, arriving before she can take in what it means.

The funeral gives that private shock a shared, physical setting. For two days, Kelly’s family sit together, playing guitar, crying, and talking to her; Ava struggles to speak among them and takes small opportunities to hold Kelly’s hand. At sunrise on the third day, Kelly’s aunties sing and people pray before the coffin is closed. Tina’s grief as she embraces the coffin remains with Ava as an enduring memory. When the coffin is carried to the car, Ava’s legs give way and her father holds her upright; watching the hearse leave makes the finality of the separation unavoidable. At the funeral, the presence of schoolgirls who had disliked Kelly intensifies Ava’s anger, though she does not confront them.

The weekly calendar continues to carry the news forward. Ava counts thirty-one Sundays since Kelly died and experiences each Sunday as a recurrence of the day her world changed. Counting gives the loss a precise measure, but it does not make the days interchangeable or bring the grief to a conclusion. Instead, the repeated Sunday marks how bereavement can return through ordinary time, long after the original announcement.

Anger, intimacy, and shared bereavement

Ava’s connection with Lincoln is shaped by their shared loss as well as by their own shifting closeness. Being with him can briefly make school, her father’s concerns, and everything else recede. Ava recognizes that this is not quite forgetting: Lincoln allows her to feel something other than misery, in a way that recalls how she felt when Kelly was alive. The comfort is complicated by the knowledge that this relationship would not have unfolded in the same way if Kelly were still there.

At another point, Ava’s distress breaks through in a confrontation with Lincoln. She accuses him of not caring and blames herself as well as him for choices that have left her feeling worse. Beneath the argument, she identifies the enduring source of her pain: she misses Kelly, and the hurt has not stopped. Lincoln tells her that he misses Kelly too and recognizes that their conflict and closeness are bound up with her absence. They cry together. Their exchange does not resolve their grief; for a moment, it makes it possible for each to witness the other’s.

Ava also has to contend with uncertainty about what Kelly intended. In retrospect, she remembers an ordinary afternoon when Kelly looked at a photograph, spoke of not forgetting it, and drew a heart on Ava’s mirror. Ava wonders whether those gestures carried a meaning she failed to recognize at the time, but she cannot know what Kelly was thinking. Later, as she tries to understand Kelly’s death, she considers whether Kelly had wanted her suffering to end rather than her life. This remains Ava’s attempt to make sense of an unbearable event, not knowledge that can settle every question or undo the loss.

Therapy, memory, and carrying grief

Ava’s grief holds anger, love, hurt, and confusion at once. At a later point she describes a sense that Kelly is still around; Lincoln answers by insisting on the reality of Kelly’s death. His response closes off that moment of shared feeling, even as it exposes their different ways of confronting absence. The scene does not establish that one response is the correct one. Instead, it shows how a bond can make Kelly feel present to Ava while the fact of her death remains undeniable.

Ava continues to see Nola for therapy every fortnight. Nola’s box analogy gives Ava a way to think about powerful feelings without treating them as problems that must be permanently removed. Ava understands that the feelings remain, whether imagined inside the box or simply no longer larger than everything else in her life. Therapy also helps her distinguish feelings from actions: grief does not have a right or wrong form, but choices made under its pressure can have consequences. Ava can regard her intimacy with Lincoln as a poor choice and her decision to end her relationship with Gideon as the right one, even though it hurt. The distinction lets her assess what she has done without condemning the fact that she is grieving.

Moving forward without leaving Kelly behind

At the first-anniversary gathering, Ava and Kelly’s family share stories beneath the rotunda at the park, laughing and crying as they celebrate Kelly’s life. Lincoln hugs Ava when she arrives with her father. They have spoken little in the intervening months, but still exchange occasional texts; Ava understands their bond as an unusual closeness that is neither simply friendship nor family. She does not regret what happened between them, though she does not take pride in it either. Her account holds affection and complication together rather than forcing their history into a simple verdict.

Ava’s understanding of the future develops on similar terms. She still goes to therapy, and she has not settled on a career: she considers helping people, perhaps through counselling, while also imagining work at Magic Kebab or becoming a poet. These possibilities do not mean she has ceased to miss Kelly. Ava rejects the idea that love for her soul sister is something she can simply move on from, but she also rejects the conclusion that her own life must remain motionless. She believes Kelly did not want pain to end Ava’s life as well, and concludes that living forward is a way of living for both of them.

The ending preserves both grief and happiness. After the anniversary gathering, Ava recognizes that sadness, anger, hurt, confusion, grief, and love remain, but they no longer overwhelm her completely. Later, she finds a card addressed to her and begins to cry from happiness. The tears do not signal that Kelly has been forgotten or that grief is over. They mark the possibility that joy can return alongside loss, and that continuing to live is not the same as abandoning the person who died.