Happiness and guilt after loss

Happiness and guilt after loss is the tension Ava Spirini faces as she begins to feel joy again after Kelly Waititi’s death. Her happiness is real, but it repeatedly opens onto the knowledge that Kelly is absent; guilt makes that absence feel like an accusation. The novel does not resolve the tension by asking Ava to forget or leave Kelly behind. Instead, it traces how she can remain attached to her friend and still choose a life that includes new pleasure, relationships, and plans.

Grief and the Refusal of Easy Comparisons

At first, Ava’s grief makes ordinary life feel stalled. After returning to school full-time, following a period of part-time attendance, she struggles to pay attention and resents other people’s attempts to compare Kelly’s death with the loss of a relative or a pet. For Ava, Kelly was not simply someone she knew but her best friend; she feels that other people’s comparisons fail to convey the particular force of that relationship. Schoolwork seems pointless beside the sadness she carries, and she does not want to explain what the loss feels like.

Six months after Kelly’s death, Ava experiences time as if it has slowed with Kelly’s absence. She thinks others are frustrated that she cannot get over what happened, while she considers six months almost no time at all. Her sense that she might feel this way for the rest of her life gives the grief a seemingly permanent horizon. The narrative’s later movement toward happiness does not make this early conviction trivial: it establishes why feeling better can seem not only unfamiliar, but disloyal.

Ava’s memories also show how grief searches the past for an explanation. Recalling an ordinary afternoon with Kelly, she wonders whether Kelly’s words and a heart drawn on a mirror carried a meaning Ava did not recognize at the time. She cannot know whether Kelly intended them as a message, and the uncertainty persists. Ava returns to the question of Kelly’s suffering, trying to understand what could have made her feel that her options had narrowed so severely. This search is an effort to make sense of the loss, but it also gives guilt somewhere to attach: Ava asks whether she should have understood or helped more, despite lacking a clear answer.

Relief, Intimacy, and Contradictory Feelings

Ava’s connection with Kelly’s brother, Lincoln, offers moments of relief without erasing the loss that makes those moments necessary. Ava notices that being with him can make school troubles and anticipated conflict with her father recede. She corrects herself, however, when she thinks of this as forgetting: the relief is better understood as briefly feeling something other than misery. She associates that change in feeling with the happiness she remembers from when Kelly was alive, even while recognizing that this closeness with Lincoln would not have developed in the same way if Kelly were still there. Comfort and painful awareness therefore arrive together.

A later night with Lincoln makes the difficulty of grieving through choices more concrete. After drinking at a party and walking with him to MacGreggor Park, Ava wakes with incomplete, disordered memories of the evening. She feels embarrassment about some of her decisions but also gratitude that, on at least one point, she did not act in a way she would have regretted. The passage does not treat this as proof that she has mastered her grief. Rather, it shows how a moment of relief can coexist with impaired judgment, hurt feelings, and the need to take responsibility for what she chooses.

Happiness with Gideon and the Return of Guilt

With Gideon, Ava finds a relationship that brings sustained happiness. At the formal, she recognizes that they have become comfortable together quickly and that she feels genuinely happy much of the time. Yet she also feels sad that Kelly cannot share the occasion. The formal had been something Ava and Kelly discussed together; its beauty and promise sharpen, rather than cancel, the fact that Kelly is gone. Ava describes the emotional effect as a reopening of the cracks in her heart that had seemed to be mending.

This coexistence matters: Ava’s grief is not presented as evidence that her happiness is false, nor does happiness mean her grief has ended. She can want to enjoy the evening and feel beautiful while also wishing Kelly were there. The return of sorrow is tied to a particular reminder, not to a simple reversal of progress. An important occasion gives the absent friend renewed presence in Ava’s thoughts, and the happiness of the present makes the difference between what is happening and what Kelly cannot share newly visible.

The conflict becomes sharper after Ava kisses Lincoln and ends her relationship with Gideon. As she tries to explain herself, she connects her fear of happiness to guilt: Kelly died unhappy, Ava believes she did not help her, and it feels unfair that Ava should be able to feel good when Kelly cannot return. Gideon tells Ava that she deserves to be happy. His reassurance does not instantly remove her guilt or settle what she should do, but it gives the central conflict a clear form: whether Ava’s continued love for Kelly requires her to refuse happiness.

Making Choices While Continuing to Grieve

By the time of the first anniversary of Kelly’s death, Ava still goes to therapy with Nola every fortnight. Nola uses a box as an analogy for difficult feelings and reminds Ava that there is no right or wrong way to feel them; the choices made in response to those feelings can, however, lead to trouble. Ava reflects on this distinction when she judges her decisions involving Lincoln and Gideon. One choice was not a good one; ending her relationship with Gideon was, in her view, the right choice, even though it hurt. The contrast shifts attention from whether grief or happiness is permissible to how Ava acts while experiencing both.

Ava’s relationship with grief also changes from the earlier belief that she must get over Kelly. She rejects the idea that she will simply move on, because Kelly was her soul sister and that love does not end. But she distinguishes moving on from being unable to move at all. Kelly’s death will continue to shape her; it does not follow that Ava must let pain determine the rest of her life. She comes to understand living as something she owes not only to herself but, in a continuing sense, to Kelly as well.

That understanding does not depend on forgetting Kelly or claiming that all the difficult feelings have gone. At the anniversary gathering, Ava and Kelly’s family tell stories about Kelly, laughing and crying as they celebrate her life. Ava later identifies the sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love as still present, even when they no longer feel larger than everything else. The ending’s pale blue envelope and Ava’s happy tears offer a final, concrete sign that happiness can occur within this ongoing attachment. The novel leaves room for grief to remain while allowing joy to be real: moving forward does not require moving away from Kelly.