Grief has no fixed path

Grief has no fixed path is the central idea Nola offers Ava Spirini when Ava cannot find sense in the timelines and expectations other people place on mourning. Rather than promising a quick recovery or prescribing a sequence of stages, Nola acknowledges grief as irregular and lasting. Her account becomes a framework through which Ava can understand not only her continuing pain, but also the possibility of changing and living without ceasing to love Kelly Waititi.

Nola’s Graph and the Rejection of Stages

Nola explains grief by drawing a simple graph: one line represents time, another the experience of grief, and an x marks the death. She then fills the space beyond that point with haphazard purple squiggles. The image matters because it refuses the clean upward or downward trajectory that a graph might seem to promise. Time proceeds, but grief does not plot itself into a stable curve. Nola tells Ava there is no typical path; how a person feels is not an error that needs correcting. The prospect is not that grief will quickly disappear, but that there may eventually be a little less of it, at an unknowable time.

Ava initially expects another explanation that will fail to fit her experience. Instead, Nola’s frank acknowledgment that grief is painful brings Ava relief. What helps is not a technique for controlling sorrow but the recognition that sorrow does not have to be disguised as progress. Nola is surprised that Ava welcomes this account, since other people often want a more reassuring answer. Their exchange establishes a distinction between comfort that depends on promising an outcome and support that begins by accepting what is true now.

Nola also speaks from her own bereavement. Her father died four years earlier, and she still misses him daily; she describes the reflex of reaching for her phone to call him before remembering that she cannot. Ava recognizes the same kind of everyday impulse in her own wish to tell Kelly about a song or something Kelly would have found funny. Their losses are not presented as identical, but the exchange makes room for a continuing bond with someone who has died. Remembering is not evidence that Ava has failed to progress; it is part of how love remains present.

Time, Recurrence, and Uneven Feeling

Ava’s experience gives Nola’s graph its lived form. Six months after Kelly’s death, Ava feels that time has slowed and worries she will feel this way for the rest of her life. She notices the mismatch between the calendar and her internal sense of time: six months seems brief beside the permanence of the loss, while other people behave as though she should already have recovered. Their impatience deepens her isolation rather than supplying a measure of how she ought to feel.

The novel makes recurrence concrete through Ava’s counting. She knows how many Sundays have passed since the morning her father told her Kelly had died, and each Sunday seems to begin in the same emotional register. Counting gives the loss a repeated place in ordinary time, but it does not mean that every day, or every moment, feels exactly alike. The return of sorrow sits alongside change; a recurring date can reopen pain without proving that nothing else in Ava’s life is moving.

Ava’s recollections of Kelly also show grief searching for meaning without arriving at certainty. Looking back at a familiar afternoon, Ava wonders whether Kelly’s words and a heart she drew on a mirror carried a meaning Ava did not recognize at the time. She cannot establish what Kelly knew or intended. The memory therefore remains both ordinary in its original context and newly charged after the death. The uncertainty is part of Ava’s mourning: remembering can deepen her sense of connection while leaving the questions unanswered.

Feeling, Action, and the Daily World

The concept also helps distinguish grief itself from decisions made while grieving. Ava sometimes finds that being with Lincoln makes the rest of her troubles recede, or at least allows her to feel something other than misery for a while. That temporary relief does not erase Kelly or mean Ava has forgotten her. The novel places these lighter intervals beside the loss, showing that they can coexist rather than cancel one another out.

At other times, Ava looks back with embarrassment and gratitude at choices made while distressed. She recognizes that some decisions were unwise, but does not treat a regretted action as proof that her grief is false or that she is beyond help. Later, in therapy, she can name sleeping with Lincoln as a poor choice while also judging her breakup with Gideon as right, even though it hurt. Nola’s recurring emphasis is that there is no correct emotional response, while the choices made in response to intense feelings can have consequences. The distinction offers Ava a way to take responsibility without condemning herself for feeling pain.

Change Without Moving On

Nola does not tell Ava that she can return to who she was before Kelly died. She explains that people change continuously, and that Ava is grieving not only Kelly but also parts of her former self. This recognition complicates any simple account of recovery as a return to normal. Ava remains alive and changed; the work ahead is to consider what this changed self wants, rather than to reproduce an earlier version of herself.

Nola suggests that Ava take change a week at a time, leaving later changes for the person Ava will be in the future unless there is something she wants to address now. The scale is deliberately modest. It does not set a deadline for grief or claim that a week will resolve anything; it makes the future less overwhelming by allowing the next step to be enough. Ava responds by talking about Gideon and the conflict between them, putting the idea into practice as a way to consider a present concern rather than solve her whole life at once.

The Box and Forward Motion

Later, Ava continues seeing Nola every fortnight, and the box becomes a recurring analogy for holding grief. Ava can still feel sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love; at times these feelings seem contained, and at other times they are simply not larger than everything else she is. The image does not establish that grief has been shut away permanently. Instead, it gives Ava a way to describe how painful feelings can remain without occupying the whole of every moment.

By the novel’s later account, Ava rejects the idea that she must move on from Kelly as though their relationship could be left behind. She understands Kelly as her soul sister and believes that this love does not end. At the same time, she separates moving forward from abandoning the dead: Kelly’s death will continue to shape her, but Ava believes she owes it to Kelly to keep living. The distinction completes the concept’s significance. There is no fixed route out of grief, no required point at which memory becomes irrelevant, and no need to confuse a brief calm or a future plan with forgetting. Forward motion is possible while love and loss remain part of the same life.