Tully's Dance Outside Kate's Funeral

Tully's Dance Outside Kate's Funeral transforms a moment of retreat from Kate's funeral into a private farewell shaped by their shared history. Unable to face the service, Tully walks outside; there, a box Kate deliberately left for her provides a cigarette, a familiar photograph, and music. When Dancing Queen begins, Tully stands and dances alone in the street. The gesture does not undo death. It gives Tully a way to feel that Kate remains with her through their memories and the life they shared.

Causes and Background

Kate dies on a bleak, rainy October night with her loved ones gathered around her bed. She says goodbye to them one by one, then closes her eyes for the last time. The funeral brings together the Ryan and Mularkey families, but for Tully it also makes the loss insistently public: the church is filled with photographs, flowers, and friends, and the service includes a priest's memories and a montage of Kate's life displayed above her coffin.

Tully had already been asked to carry the practical weight of the funeral. Kate's final to-do list concerned the arrangements, and Tully follows it closely. Kate has chosen Tully's favorite flowers rather than her own. While the Ryans and Mularkeys sit together on the beach, holding hands and remembering Kate, Tully focuses on managing the details. This work gives her something to do, but it cannot prepare her for the service itself or make the reality of Kate's death easier to bear.

Kate has also anticipated that Tully may be unable to stay inside. At their first meeting about the funeral, Kate's husband, Johnny, warns Tully that the cancer in Kate's brain has affected her faculties, leaving her with good moments and not-so-good ones. In the separate farewell she prepares, however, Kate's understanding of Tully is unmistakable. She entrusts a large black box to someone who will give it to Tully on the day of the funeral, expecting that Tully will be standing outside when the service begins. Even in the face of death, Kate knows the friend who has stood beside her for more than three decades.

Leaving the Service

Tully stops before going into the church. When Johnny asks her to come, she cannot move and asks the family to go ahead without her. The family files into the front row, while she remains outside the entrance. Inside, an organ begins a slow version of You and Me Against the World, the song associated with the friends' promise to face the world together.

The service is painful not simply because it is sad, but because its public forms cannot contain what Kate means to Tully. Tully does not want the music designed to make people cry, the priest's account of a woman who was only a shadow of the person she knew, or the large-screen montage above the coffin. Before she can reconsider, she turns and walks out. The funeral continues without her; inside, the music changes to One Sweet Day. Outside, Tully gulps fresh air and leans against the door, needing distance from the ceremony's images and sounds.

The Box Kate Leaves

On the bottom step, Tully encounters the person carrying Kate's gift. The messenger explains that Kate had instructed him to deliver the box on the day of her funeral and had predicted that Tully would be outside when it began. Tully smiles through the pain because Kate has known exactly what she would do. She accepts the box, crosses the parking lot, and sits on an iron park bench across the street before opening it.

A letter lies on top. Tully recognizes Kate's bold, left-slanted handwriting, and the letter addresses the difficult truth of Tully's absence from the funeral: Kate has expected her not to be able to stand through it. Rather than demand that Tully conform to the public ritual, Kate has arranged another, personal form of goodbye. The box makes their understanding tangible: Kate has prepared for Tully's grief with the same intimate knowledge that has defined their friendship.

Three objects remain in the box. A Virginia Slims cigarette carries a yellow sticky note saying, Smoke me. An autographed picture of David Cassidy says, Kiss me. An iPod and headphones say, Play me and dance. The instructions recall the language and rituals of their shared past, giving Tully something particular to do when the formal service becomes unbearable. She lights the cigarette, takes a drag, and coughs on the exhale. Its smell brings back their nights by the Pilchuck River, lying against fallen logs and looking up at the Milky Way.

Music, Memory, and the Farewell

Tully puts on the headphones and starts the music. Dancing Queen blares out, carrying her back in time. Standing in the middle of the street, she is unsure whether she is laughing or crying; what she knows is that she is not alone. She and Kate have had more than three decades of good times and bad times, and death cannot take those years or their memories from her. Their shared music becomes a form of continued companionship: Kate is gone, yet the life they made together remains available through remembered places, songs, and gestures.

The dance also completes the contrast between the funeral inside and Kate's farewell outside. In the church, Tully cannot bear to watch the images of Kate's life assembled over her coffin. Across the street, Kate's carefully chosen objects return that life to Tully in a form only their friendship could give: a cigarette recalling the riverbank, an old David Cassidy photograph, and the song they can inhabit together through memory. Rather than a refusal to love Kate or to mourn her, leaving the service allows Tully to grieve in a way grounded in their private history.

Alone in the street, Tully dances. The movement does not resolve her loss, but it changes the scene from helpless separation into an act of connection: the friend who once feared being left behind finds, for this moment, a way to experience Kate as present in the memories and music they share. The funeral marks Kate's death; Tully's dance gives their lifelong friendship its final image, not as a promise that nothing will change, but as a bond the loss cannot erase.