Grief and love are intertwined

Grief and love are intertwined is the understanding Lennie Walker reaches after Bailey Walker’s death: mourning does not end by erasing attachment, and living on does not mean leaving the dead behind. The idea gathers force through Lennie’s repeated encounters with absence, from calling Bailey’s still-active phone number to confronting the future her sister will not share. By the novel’s end, grief remains permanent, but Lennie can carry it alongside music, memory, and a future of her own.

Absence and the persistence of connection

Bailey’s death first appears to Lennie as a brutal divide between ordinary life and irreversible loss. Remembering the night of the phone call, she recalls doing chemistry and thinking about dinner while Bailey, elsewhere, was taking her last breath. The contrast makes the world’s continuation feel almost impossible to understand: schoolwork and hunger persist at the very moment a life ends. Lennie’s questions about what to do after the worst has happened give grief its immediate form—not a settled emotion, but a rupture in her sense of how time and ordinary concerns can coexist.

One response is to reach for Bailey through the phone. Lennie discovers that Bailey’s account has not yet been canceled and calls her number, hears her recorded greeting, hangs up, and calls again repeatedly. At last, she stays on the line long enough to address Bailey directly, asking why she had not been told about the wedding. The calls cannot restore a conversation between sisters, and the greeting sharpens rather than resolves the silence. Yet Lennie’s reaching out also shows that her relationship with Bailey continues to shape what she needs to say, even when no answer can come.

That connection is not only comforting. At the beginning of summer, Lennie and the rest of the family are described as scattered and unable to settle. She avoids Gram’s offer of tea, a ritual they shared before Bailey’s death, while Gram follows her with a full teapot and two mugs. Lennie does not want to talk, and Gram’s attempt to resume their old routine cannot make the loss ordinary. The scene shows how love persists in familiar gestures even when the bereaved person cannot yet accept their comfort; the same shared history that makes the tea meaningful also makes its absence from their former life palpable.

Grief changes the experience of living

Lennie’s mourning also unsettles her feelings and conduct. She finds herself kissing her pillow and imagining a person she believes she should not kiss, and is disturbed by the contrast with her earlier, more guarded experience of desire. Her confusion belongs to a wider fear that Bailey’s death has altered her in ways she cannot neatly explain. Grief does not arrive as a single, separate feeling: it accompanies changes in how Lennie experiences intimacy, risk, and the force of being alive.

A moment alone in the woods makes that unease explicit. After writing on a discarded cup and burying it beneath pine needles, Lennie lies on the forest floor and wonders what she would feel if Bailey were still alive. She imagines that she might have been happy, but only mildly so, protected inside the shell of her old self. Now she feels exposed and devastated, yet also more intensely responsive to the world and drawn to the clarinet. The possibility that something in her has opened through loss troubles her: she does not want any good change to seem like compensation for Bailey’s death. She finds a way to hold the conflict without treating the change as a benefit that makes the loss worthwhile. Bailey had urged her to come out of her shell, and Lennie can understand her present openness as a lesson carried forward from Bailey’s life, not a gift bestowed by her death.

That movement between being overwhelmed by loss and re-entering ordinary activity recurs through the summer. After practicing music for two hours, Lennie describes the experience as turning the air into colors and considers returning to summer band practice. At another point, she is lying on a forest floor, imagining the calmer happiness she might have known if Bailey were alive. Neither the pleasure of playing nor the thought of a possible life without this upheaval cancels the bereavement. Together, these moments show that Lennie’s attachment to Bailey can remain real while Lennie becomes capable of music, desire, friendship, and change.

The future that remains

The cost of survival becomes most concrete when Lennie thinks of the experiences she and Bailey will never share: holding Bailey’s baby, teaching the child clarinet, and simply growing older together. The loss is not only of past memories but of a whole set of imagined ordinary days. In the scene that follows, Lennie is without the distracting comfort of Toby Shaw’s arms or the solace she associates with Joe Fontaine; alone, she confronts the absence at the center of her grief. Her language narrows until Bailey’s absence becomes the fact she cannot escape. The scene makes clear that other relationships may offer shelter, but cannot replace the sister she has lost.

Later, as Lennie runs from school into the woods to write a poem to Joe, the fact that she has a future and Bailey does not runs beside her. The recognition does not resolve the unfairness. Instead, it brings Lennie to the understanding that Bailey will die again in memory throughout Lennie’s life: grief will not simply go away, because love will not go away. She conceives of the two as inseparable, and of mourning as something that becomes part of her, step for step and breath for breath. This changes the question from how to stop grieving to how to continue living while carrying the bond.

Her return to music belongs to that continuation, not to a clean break from grief. Lennie challenges another clarinetist for first chair in September, then runs into the woods and toward the Forest bedroom to write. The future she has feared is still marked by Bailey’s absence, but it also includes choices, ambition, and creative work. The movement from the school music room into the woods makes forward motion physical without suggesting that Lennie has outrun her loss.

Remembrance without an ending

Lennie’s first visit to Bailey’s grave brings the idea into a concrete act of remembrance. After finishing work with Gram, she loads her backpack and runs through alternating blocks of sunlight and shade toward the cemetery. As she runs, she feels the fabric of death that has clung to her for months begin to loosen. The brief, private happiness of moving freely does not remove Bailey from her thoughts; it marks a moment in which life becomes physically available again.

At the grave, Lennie rests against the warm stone and traces Bailey’s name and the words she had chosen for the inscription. She brings a notebook containing her transcription of Gram’s letters to their mother and places it inside the gravestone’s small cabinet. Lennie wants Bailey to have those words and to remain part of the family’s story. The gesture makes remembrance active: the dead sister is not treated as someone who must be forgotten for the living to proceed, but as someone whose place in the family continues to matter.

The cabinet holds another object as well: an orange topaz ring, which Lennie realizes Toby must have commissioned for Bailey. She infers that Bailey and Toby had been waiting for the ring before announcing their marriage and the baby. The ring makes the future Lennie has already mourned newly tangible, because Bailey never got to see it or show it off. Lennie kisses the ring and returns it to the cabinet beside the notebook, placing the symbols of Bailey’s interrupted future alongside words meant to keep her present in the family’s memory.

The visit ends with Lennie taking Lennie’s houseplant from her backpack. Reduced to a few blackened leaves, it is removed from its pot; Lennie shakes the dirt from its roots and throws it over the cliff above the falls. The act follows her intimate encounter with Bailey’s name, the letters, and the ring, rather than replacing those acts of remembrance. The ending therefore gives grief no neat cure: Lennie can release one failing object while preserving her connection to Bailey. Her understanding is not that love makes loss bearable in any simple sense, but that the pain endures because the relationship does—and that living forward can include both.