The miseries

The miseries are Lizzy Enders’s recurring name for grief that returns in waves after Mama’s death, especially when she is alone with the fact of her absence. The expression gathers together more than sadness: it marks the moment when loss overwhelms distraction, unsettles Lizzy’s sense of herself, and leaves her wanting to howl. Its force comes from repetition. At the cemetery, at dusk, during evening services, and in a letter to her uncle, the same pain returns in different settings, each time exposing the limits of the ways Lizzy tries to contain it.

What the Expression Names

Lizzy first describes the miseries as a force that comes upon her after she has brought Mrs. Lacey up the hill to Fort Marcy. The cemetery makes her uneasy, but not simply because the dead lie there or because bones are surfacing from the ground. The deeper cause is that she wishes Mama were beside her and instead remembers her mother’s lonely grave, covered with stones on the prairie. The cemetery’s visible remains sharpen a private absence: Lizzy’s mother is not among the dead around her, but far away in the landscape of memory. When the feeling exhausts her, Lizzy wants to stand and howl like a wolf.

That animal image makes the emotion seem both bodily and difficult to govern. The miseries are not described as a composed act of remembrance; they arrive with an urgency that overpowers ordinary speech. The exposed bones at Fort Marcy also become an image for Lizzy’s own vulnerability. Her grief is something she feels in her spirit, but the narrative gives it physical pressure, as if pain has stripped away whatever protected her from the world.

Places and Times of Return

Fort Marcy concentrates the miseries because it joins death, memory, and Lizzy’s responsibilities to the living. During her visits to the cemetery, she looks for Delvina, and she must also make sure Mrs. Lacey gets home before dark. On one visit, Mrs. Lacey speaks of the cemetery as a place where the living can hide as well as a home for the dead; Lizzy recognizes that Mrs. Lacey is having one of her confused moments and rides away toward the edges of the fort. The errand continues, but it does not erase the grief waiting there.

Dusk makes that grief especially acute. Lizzy can smell piñon smoke rising from fireplaces in town, while the afternoon light drops behind the Jemez Mountains. She feels her losses stand out more sharply inside her, and compares her soul to a landscape stripped of its green places, with pain jutting out and unprotected like the cemetery’s bare bones. The return to the academy promises bustle rather than solitude: the chatter of the five boarders, the kitchen’s sounds and smells, and the preparations for supper can distract her. She wants to get back, yet she waits while Mrs. Lacey says her prayers and leaves food for Delvina. The scene places care for others beside a grief that care cannot resolve.

The Delay and Force of Mourning

Lizzy does not think about Mama continuously. During the day, memories come in the ordinary shape of things she wants to tell her mother or things she imagines Mama will learn later. Then the realization arrives that there will be no more telling and no later discovery. What hurts most is the blankness that follows her understanding that Mama is gone forever. Lizzy cannot make the word forever fit the loss, so she pushes the thought aside until evening services.

At the service, postponement fails. Lizzy pictures Mama coming at her with the force of a dust storm; the memory of her lavender reaches her nostrils, while her voice returns in Lizzy’s mind with instructions about not helping her father unless he asks, because he needs to feel independent with one arm. Grief therefore brings back not only the fact of death but also intimate sensory memory and remembered advice. Lizzy sits benumbed amid incense and music, too weary to keep resisting the recollection. In chapel, she can cry without anyone minding; crying is common among the girls. That permission offers a place for tears, but it does not end the miseries. Lizzy observes that after crying she still has them, only worse.

Naming Grief and Seeking Witness

In a letter to Uncle William, Lizzy turns her private experience into an explicit account of mourning. She says that mourning does not help and only makes the spirit more destitute; if it helped, she writes, she would howl her grief from the highest point of Fort Marcy. Instead, she cries every night in chapel and remains worse afterward. The letter makes clear that the miseries are not a single cemetery-bound reaction but a continuing condition that follows her into the convent’s daily religious practice.

Lizzy’s anger at the Catholic girls and nuns also belongs to this account of grief. She feels that their language of offering suffering misunderstands Mama’s death, and that their images of saints’ spectacular deaths leave little room for the significance of an ordinary woman’s loss. The contrast is not between grief and faith in the abstract; it is between Lizzy’s particular bereavement and the explanations surrounding her that she cannot accept. She makes an exception for Sister Roberta, whom she describes as a friend who listens and stands up for her. Being heard does not remove the loss, but it distinguishes companionship from the responses that leave Lizzy feeling misunderstood.

The phrase also gains meaning through Lizzy’s trust in Mrs. Lacey. By the riverbank, Lizzy tells her about her fears of never hearing from her father and finds the conversation almost as good as having her friend Cassie beside her. When Mrs. Lacey affirms that belief may be called magic, she offers a kind of receptive company distinct from the girls’ and nuns’ formulaic consolation. Across these scenes, the miseries name a grief that returns despite errands, conversation, ritual, and tears: each can accompany Lizzy through it, but none makes Mama’s absence less final.