Kelly Waititi’s death

Kelly Waititi’s death by suicide is first presented through Ava Spirini’s memory of learning the news, not through an account of Kelly’s final moments. The distinction shapes the event’s force: Ava can remember the exact arrival of the announcement, but not make sense of the loss it announces. In the months that follow, the death remains a measure of time and a pressure on ordinary life, returning in her school difficulties, her closeness with Lincoln, and her changing understanding of grief.

The Call and the Announcement

Ava recalls that Kelly and Lincoln’s father called her father’s home phone at 5:37 a.m. The house phone woke her, and she checked the time immediately. Seven minutes later, her father came into her room. His eyes were filling with tears, and before he spoke Ava knew that something was wrong. She assumed that one of her grandparents might have died; the delay before the news seemed to stretch around that expectation.

Her father began to tell her what had happened, saying Kelly’s name before completing the sentence with the news that she had died. Ava remembers the announcement as the instant her life up to that point was overturned. She could not move or properly take in what her father was saying. The recollection presents the news in fragments, with the blunt fact of Kelly’s death cutting through the confusion. It gives the reader the event’s immediate human shape: a parent delivering devastating news to a daughter who has just woken, and a best friend abruptly absent.

What Ava Can and Cannot Know

The novel identifies Kelly’s death as suicide, but Ava’s account does not claim access to Kelly’s final thoughts. Later, Ava turns the unanswered question over repeatedly, wondering whether Kelly had wanted to die or had wanted only for her pain to stop. She tries to find new information and to imagine how overwhelming that pain must have been. These are Ava’s efforts to understand, not confirmed explanations of Kelly’s state of mind. The distinction matters: grief drives Ava to search for certainty, while the narrative leaves the private circumstances of Kelly’s death unresolved.

That uncertainty also shapes Ava’s sense of the time afterward. At one point she says that six months have passed and insists that this is no time at all; she fears she will feel the same way for the rest of her life. In another recollection, she counts thirty-one Sundays since Kelly died. The count turns a calendar into a record of recurring loss: Sunday does not simply follow Sunday but repeatedly recalls the distance from the morning she received the news.

Grief in Ordinary Life

Ava’s return to school shows how the death continues to affect daily routines. She has been back full-time for only a month, after several weeks attending part-time, and says she would not have returned if the decision were hers. Pressure over Year 11 work and her father’s dwindling ability to make excuses for her help bring her back, but attendance does not restore her concentration. Recent weeks blur together as she struggles to pay attention or avoids school. Other people’s comparisons between Kelly’s death and the deaths of their own relatives or pets leave Ava feeling that they do not understand the particular loss of her best friend.

The distance between school’s ordinary demands and Ava’s grief is stark: quadratic equations seem pointless while her body aches with numb sadness. She also feels that people are angry with her, and with Kelly, as though they resent both the death and Ava’s inability to recover on their timetable. The novel gives no indication that this pressure resolves the grief. Instead, the contrast shows how a loss can remain overwhelming even as institutions and other people expect everyday life to resume.

Kelly’s absence also changes Ava’s relationship with Lincoln. Ava recognizes that being with him makes other troubles recede for a while, or at least lets her feel something other than misery. She compares that temporary relief with how she felt when Kelly was alive, while acknowledging that her closeness with Lincoln would never have happened in the same way had Kelly survived. Later, Ava looks back on sleeping with Lincoln as a poor choice. Her account links their intimacy to the altered emotional world after the death without treating it as a replacement for Kelly or as a way of resolving the loss.

Remembering Without a Timetable

A year after Kelly’s death, Ava recalls gathering with Kelly’s family beneath the rotunda at the park to tell stories about her. They laugh about the things Kelly used to do and cry; the gathering celebrates Kelly’s life. The scene marks a change in how remembrance can feel, but it does not suggest that the sadness has disappeared. Ava later describes sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love as feelings that are all still present. Sometimes, she says, they are contained in the box she has learned to use as an image for grief; at other times, they simply do not outweigh everything else in her.

Ava continues fortnightly therapy with Nola, who reminds her that there is no single right or wrong way to feel, even though choices made under the force of those feelings can cause trouble. This later perspective sits beside Ava’s earlier fear that she will feel devastated forever, rather than proving that the fear was foolish or that grief follows a fixed schedule. Kelly’s death remains the event that reorganizes Ava’s sense of time and her relationships, while the novel’s movement from the remembered phone call to the anniversary gathering makes room for both continuing pain and moments of connection.