Apollo's bereavement

Apollo Kagwa’s bereavement is presented not as a single moment of sorrow but as an altered condition of existence. After Brian dies, the losses gather together: Apollo is left without his son, without the wife he thought he knew, and without the marriage he had understood himself to have. In prison, he experiences himself as barely alive; after release, even the journey home becomes something he cannot yet face. Grief follows him into speech, public space, and the uncertain prospect of recovery.

Loss and suspended life

The scale of Apollo’s loss is expressed through the question of how long it might take to regain what had been lost or taken away. The inventory is both intimate and cumulative: a son, a wife, a marriage, and three lives. The word regain leaves recovery open as a possibility, but the question offers no timetable or assurance that what is lost can be restored in its former shape.

The account connects Apollo’s bereavement with his imprisonment, while distinguishing the act that brought him there as its own story. He had used a shotgun to hold three people hostage, and was sent to Rikers Island. The other prisoners do not offer him emotional support; they are occupied with their own circumstances. Apollo finds a bleak kind of relief in that absence of attention. His days are reduced to the imposed routines of moving, eating, and showering, while he feels that nothing more remains of him. He becomes convinced that his heart failed, or was removed, during surgery on his eye. His explanation for feeling no fear in jail is more absolute: he believes he is not actually alive, because he died when Brian died.

The son's name and the silence around it

Sixty days after Apollo was handcuffed by the police, someone else says his son’s name aloud. Apollo has not spoken the name since his arrest, although in his own mind he has repeated it continually. The contrast between inward repetition and outward silence makes the name difficult to hear from another person. Its sound in that other voice feels strange to him, and his immediate impulse is to silence the speaker. The passage shows grief returning through an ordinary act of conversation: the name is both familiar and newly estranged, held close in thought but difficult to encounter in public.

This silence is not presented as a lack of attachment. Apollo’s private repetition of Brian’s name makes the opposite clear. Yet the name cannot simply be spoken as if the loss were an ordinary fact. Speech brings the absent child into the present, and Apollo reacts with distress rather than comfort. The moment gives his bereavement a concrete measure: not only has he lost Brian, but for two months he has been unable to say aloud the name by which he remembers him.

Release without a homecoming

When the men leave the release bus, Apollo does not share their apparent eagerness to return home. The narration considers, without claiming certainty, whether Rikers releases prisoners in such a remote place and at such an early hour to limit possible collateral damage. Apollo imagines the landscape through the comparison of distant nuclear testing and the uninhabitable Bikini Atoll. He feels, by analogy, as though grief has made him glow and mourning has poisoned him. The image turns release into an exposure to loss rather than a clean return to ordinary life.

Apollo cannot go home, at least not yet. The destination that other passengers want is unavailable to him because he no longer experiences himself as having a home. His release therefore changes his physical circumstances without resolving his bereavement. The bus carries him out of prison, but it cannot carry him back into the family life that has ended. This distinction—between being released and feeling able to return—shapes the account’s view of what follows Brian’s death.

Public support and continued isolation

Apollo later stays at the Yorkville Branch of the New York Public Library until it closes at seven in the evening. He spends the remaining hours on the main floor, sitting near the checkout desk with a magazine in his lap. Before that, he has attended a Survivors group and told its members what he had done. Sharing his actions has been uncomfortable; immediately afterward, he feels worse. The group has at least placed him among people living with loss, but that temporary company gives way to the familiar fact of being alone once the session ends.

The account places Apollo’s experience beside that of a gray-bearded man from the group. The man had been texting while driving when a moving truck struck his car, and his fiancée died before the car stopped spinning. The detail establishes that the group contains people whose losses arose under different circumstances, without making their grief interchangeable. Apollo questions whether he can endure six months of meetings, yet he also understands the consequence of not attending: he would be sent back to Rikers Island, with no quick release date secured. He remains in the library for hours, caught between the difficulty of group support and the prospect of renewed confinement. The surviving passage ends with him trying to talk; it does not say whether the effort succeeds or whether he recovers.