Bailey’s funeral and Lennie’s breakdown mark the moment when the work of arranging a burial gives way to the fact of death itself. Lennie Walker has spent days making decisions and holding herself silent; when she sees Bailey before the funeral, that self-control breaks. She shakes Bailey and begs her to speak, then is carried from the church by Big into the rain. The funeral’s brief applause and the private scene by the creek place public ceremony beside grief that cannot be contained or made orderly.

Preparations and suspended grief

In the days before the service, Lennie takes on decisions that belong to the funeral’s practical machinery. She helps Gram choose Bailey’s casket and cemetery plot, and revises several lines in the obituary composed by Big. She also chooses Bailey’s final dress: a black, slinky one that Lennie considers inappropriate but knows Bailey loved. The choices are intimate, but none can change their purpose. Lennie is selecting what will surround and represent her sister after death, while the person for whom she makes those choices can no longer answer.

Lennie later recalls that she made these decisions for days without saying a word. Her silence makes the contrast between competence and comprehension stark: she can select a dress, help choose a casket, and edit an obituary, but the tasks do not mean she has absorbed Bailey’s death. Writing a few lines on a piece of paper is another part of this period of preparation; months later, the phrase she gave Gram in the funeral parlor appears on Bailey’s gravestone as The color of extraordinary. The words endure where Lennie’s ability to speak does not.

The service

At the end of the service, someone from Bailey’s drama class calls out bravo. Everyone jumps to their feet and begins clapping. Lennie remembers thinking the roof might blow. The moment is a sudden collective response inside a ceremony otherwise centered on loss: the gathered people rise together, and the sound seems almost too large for the room. The account does not explain precisely what prompted the cry or what the applause signifies, so its force lies in Lennie’s startled memory of the crowd’s movement and the noise filling the service.

The scene’s public gesture does not resolve the private rupture. The applause is something the congregation can do together; Lennie’s encounter with Bailey is what she cannot bear alone. The narrative moves from a roomful of people standing and clapping to the intimate, physical scene before the funeral, where Lennie’s grief takes the form of shaking the body and demanding a response. The contrast makes the service more than a formal milestone: it is the setting around a loss that ceremony can acknowledge but cannot undo.

Lennie’s breakdown

Before the funeral, Lennie sees Bailey and loses control. She shakes her sister, believing, in the extremity of the moment, that she might wake her and get her out of the casket. When Bailey does not wake, Lennie screams, “Talk to me.” The demand turns the silence that has surrounded Lennie for days into an explicit confrontation: she is addressing Bailey as the sister who should answer, while the body before her makes an answer impossible. Her breakdown is not a considered farewell but a desperate attempt to reverse what has happened.

Big responds by lifting Lennie into his arms and carrying her out of the room and the church. He takes her into the slamming rain and down to the creek, holding a black coat over their heads. There, the two of them sob together beneath it. The movement from the funeral room to the creek changes the scene from public ritual to shared family grief; Big does not silence Lennie or explain the loss, but stays physically with her while they cry. The coat offers shelter from the weather, not from the death that has brought them there.

Aftermath and continuing grief

The funeral does not end Lennie’s attempts to reach Bailey. Later, sitting at Bailey’s desk, Lennie discovers that her sister’s phone account has not yet been canceled. She calls, hears Bailey’s recorded greeting, hangs up, and calls again repeatedly before finally letting the message continue. The action echoes the plea at the funeral: both are efforts to hear Bailey answer, though one meets a silent body and the other a preserved voice. The recording provides a fragment of Bailey’s presence without restoring the everyday exchanges Lennie misses.

In the weeks that follow, grief unsettles the household as well as Lennie. With school out, Gram, Big, and Lennie are described as going in different directions; Gram follows Lennie with tea, trying to revive their former late-afternoon talks, while Lennie avoids conversation. Lennie also finds herself caught in new, confusing impulses and repeatedly imagines kissing the person she believes she must not kiss. These reactions do not cancel her mourning; they show how bereavement and the demands of continuing to live press against each other.

Lennie later understands grief not as a single crisis that the funeral has completed, but as something that will accompany her into the future. Running through the woods, she recognizes that Bailey will die again and again in her memory, and that grief remains joined to love. That understanding gives the funeral scene its lasting place in the narrative: Lennie’s collapse exposes the immediate violence of the loss, while her later actions—calling Bailey’s number, carrying words to her grave, and continuing forward—show a bond that changes form rather than disappearing.