Brett’s bereavement

Brett Bohlinger’s bereavement is not a single passage through sadness but a recurring force that reshapes how she inhabits her home, remembers her mother, and responds to the future. Elizabeth Bohlinger’s death leaves Brett reaching for the person who knew her most intimately; in time, the champagne, journal, photograph, memories, and letters her mother left behind become ways of sustaining that connection while Brett continues living.

The shock of loss

Brett’s first responses to her mother’s death are physical and disorienting. At the funeral luncheon, she collapses in front of the assembled guests, landing in the foyer with her black dress hiked up and one shoe missing. When she wakes later at Elizabeth Bohlinger’s house, workers are stacking plates and glasses into plastic bins. The practical clearing-away of the gathering collides with the truth she has temporarily forgotten: her mother is dead. Brett describes the pain as arriving anew, rather than as something she has steadily absorbed.

The recurrence is central to her experience. Because Elizabeth Bohlinger’s illness and death came quickly, Brett finds the loss almost unreal; she wakes having forgotten it, only to suffer the discovery again. Her memory of the humiliating fall comes back in fuzzy snapshots, but shame is secondary to the larger absence. She wonders whether life can feel all right without the one person who loved her unconditionally, and whether she will ever remember her mother without a cramp in her chest. Her lament that she has “so much more daughter left in me” gives the grief a particular shape: she has not only lost her mother, but the continuing relationship in which she could still be someone’s daughter.

Objects that keep the relationship present

In Elizabeth Bohlinger’s room, Brett finds the rare champagne her mother had saved after her first doctor’s appointment. The bottle had been set aside for a celebration at the end of treatment, when mother and daughter could toast a clean bill of health. Now, during the funeral luncheon, Brett feels too bereft to drink it: a promise of future recovery has become an emblem of the future they did not get. She nevertheless opens it. The cork knocks over a bottle of Kytril, and the scattered tablets bring back a scene of caring for her mother after chemotherapy, when the medicine finally eased Elizabeth Bohlinger’s nausea enough for her to sleep.

A slim, cracked red journal, tied with a faded yellow ribbon, carries a different instruction. A heart-shaped tag tells Brett to save it for a day when she feels stronger and to raise a glass to the two of them now. Brett wants to read the journal immediately, but imagines her mother gently reproving her impatience. She sets it aside and kisses the cover, promising to wait. The restraint matters: the journal is not merely a record to be opened, but a message whose timing Brett chooses to respect. In the same room, grief moves between the past act of tending to Elizabeth Bohlinger and the possibility of hearing her voice later.

Grief amid rupture and return

After her relationship with Andrew breaks apart, Brett spends the night on a sofa beneath a photograph of Elizabeth Bohlinger at an awards ceremony where she was named Chicago’s Businesswoman of the Year. The photograph, with her mother’s familiar cropped hair and green eyes, first embodies wisdom and serenity; Brett then turns it into the focus of accusation. She blames her mother for the losses gathering around her—her job, home, relationship, and hope of having a child—and asks whether Elizabeth Bohlinger planned to ruin her life. The outburst does not cancel her love. It shows how grief can make the dead both the person most urgently wanted and the person held responsible for the living daughter’s pain.

The loss also surfaces when Brett reconnects with Carrie Newsome after eighteen years. Hearing that her mother had insisted she try teaching again, Brett explains that the instruction began as an order but led her back to a friendship she had missed. Carrie’s response—that Elizabeth Bohlinger knew teaching suited her—helps Brett recognize that she has been carrying shame she had not fully understood. Her heart feels lighter as she turns the conversation toward Carrie’s life with Stella Myers and their adopted children. The encounter does not replace her mother; it demonstrates how following a direction left by Elizabeth Bohlinger can lead Brett back into human connection.

Recurrence through family and the seasons

Brett’s bereavement returns sharply at Christmas, when a pregnancy scare ends in the loss of the child she had believed she was carrying. On a day her family gathers around food and a new puppy, she remains emotionally numb and repeatedly retreats to the upstairs bathroom. The loss of the hoped-for baby revives her mother’s death: Brett thinks that Elizabeth Bohlinger, who loved the holidays, should have been there for one more Christmas. She remembers the previous year’s ordinary gift and her mother’s delight in it, then imagines telling her about the grandchild she had hoped to give her. This memory joins two absences without making them identical; both intensify Brett’s longing for the comfort only her mother could offer.

Even brief family conversations sit within the changed world Elizabeth Bohlinger’s death has left behind. Shelley tells Brett she has quit her work as a speech pathologist, a calling she once cherished, because Shelley and Jay Bohlinger decide one parent should stay home with the children. Later, Shelley says she will return to work in May after recognizing that full-time motherhood has made her unhappy and that Jay Bohlinger supports her choice. These decisions are not presented as Brett’s own grief, but they show how the inheritance and the family’s altered circumstances continue to reorganize life after the death.

A continuing bond, not a clean ending

Brett’s mother remains present in practical instructions as well as memories. Before agreeing to a six-week substitute-teaching position, Brett stares at an EXIT sign and considers fleeing. She thinks of the goal list and of the maxim Elizabeth Bohlinger passed on, “Do something every day that scares you,” then stays. When Brett admits to a therapist that her mother died in September and instructed her to try teaching again, the advice is still an active influence, even though Brett has begun to make the attempt her own.

A later letter makes that continuing presence unmistakable. Read aloud by Brad Midar, it tells Brett that the man she is seeing is not right for her and urges her to keep trying. Brett responds with relief and laughter, feeling that her mother has given her a sign and released her to move on. The episode does not erase the earlier anger, loneliness, or Christmas grief. Instead, Elizabeth Bohlinger’s posthumous words become a source of discernment rather than only a reminder of what Brett has lost. Her bereavement therefore changes form: her mother cannot return, but the relationship continues through objects, remembered care, and counsel that helps Brett act in the world without pretending the absence is gone.