Sundays after Kelly’s death

Sundays after Kelly’s death become a recurring measure of Ava Spirini’s grief: she counts thirty-one, and says each one begins again with the shock of the news. The weekly rhythm makes time feel stalled, but the story’s later movement toward calm gives that repetition a second meaning: grief remains, even as Ava begins to live alongside it.

Counting the Sundays

Ava remembers the morning the news arrived with unusual precision. Kelly and Lincoln’s father called Ava’s father at 5:37 a.m.; seven minutes later, he came into Ava’s room and told her that Kelly had died. Ava initially feared that something had happened to her grandparents, then understood the news as her father struggled to say it. The remembered interval between the call and the announcement marks the beginning of a changed sense of time. Ava later counts the Sundays since Kelly’s death: thirty-one. The number turns an otherwise ordinary unit of the week into a record of endurance. Each Sunday, she says, starts like the first one. The repetition is not simply a calendar reference; it shows how the loss returns in a recurring pattern, even as days continue to pass.

Time Held Still

Six months after Kelly’s death, Ava feels that time has slowed and that school, already difficult to attend, has become harder to bear. She struggles to concentrate, sometimes avoids school, and resents the expectation that she should be getting over the loss. To her, six months is not long enough to make the grief recede; she fears she may feel this way for the rest of her life. The counted Sundays give numerical form to that sense of duration, while her conviction that life has stopped expresses its emotional force. The pattern also complicates any idea that grief is constant in only one way. Ava’s connection with Lincoln sometimes makes school and other pressures matter less, and helps her feel something besides misery for a while. After a night when she makes choices she later regrets, she is nevertheless grateful that she avoided adding another painful decision to the list. These temporary shifts do not undo the Sundays or erase Kelly; they show that the experience of loss can coexist with moments of relief and with efforts to look after herself.

Memory and Uncertainty

Ava’s sense of the past keeps returning to ordinary moments with Kelly. Looking back on an afternoon when Kelly drew and redrew a heart on Ava’s mirror, Ava wonders whether the gesture carried a meaning she could not recognize at the time. She cannot know whether Kelly anticipated her death, and her later effort to find an explanation for Kelly’s pain remains uncertain. The remembered scene therefore offers no resolution: time allows Ava to revisit it, but not to establish what Kelly knew or intended. That uncertainty is part of the Sundays’ weight. Counting measures how long Kelly has been gone, but it cannot answer the questions Ava carries about her friend’s final days. The recurring interval holds both the fact of the death and Ava’s ongoing attempt to understand it, without turning remembrance into certainty.

Moving Forward Without Leaving Kelly Behind

Later, Ava describes her feelings as still present—the sadness, anger, confusion, grief, and love—but no longer larger than everything else in her. She continues fortnightly therapy with Nola, who uses the box as an analogy for grief and reminds Ava that there is no single correct way to feel. Ava recognizes that choices made under the pressure of emotion can bring trouble, while distinguishing between painful decisions that she sees as mistakes and the breakup with Gideon, which she considers right despite the hurt. Ava rejects the idea that moving forward requires moving on from Kelly. She continues to regard Kelly as her soul sister and believes their love does not end with death. At the same time, she decides that Kelly’s death will not be allowed to end her own life: she wants to live forward, partly in Kelly’s memory. The thirty-one Sundays thus record neither a completed recovery nor an unchanging stillness. They mark a continuing bond in a life that can hold grief and, eventually, calm.