Bereavement

Bereavement is a recurring emotional and narrative state in Lola’s story, beginning with the death of her father, Richard Windsor, and deepening through the later loss of her grandmother. It is presented not as a clean passage from sorrow to recovery, but as a destabilizing condition in which hunger, exhaustion, anger, loneliness, memory, and the need for affection appear together. Grief also exposes the difference between biological family and emotional belonging: Lola is surrounded by wealthy relatives and immortal society, yet repeatedly discovers that the people who should comfort her are absent, indifferent, or themselves unable to respond to loss.

The Father’s Funeral and Familial Abandonment

Lola wakes at seven in the morning exhausted and famished after her father’s cremation, recognizing the bodily contradiction that grief has made her hungry. The day’s mail has been divided into condolence cards, bills, personal correspondence, and tabloids, turning mourning into an administrative and commercial landscape before it can become a private ritual. A copy of People magazine places her mother, Mayumi May, on its cover under the headline “Mayumi May bids farewell to husband,” while the accompanying feature promises exclusive photographs. The magazine does not even name Richard Windsor prominently, reducing the dead man to the role of the husband of a celebrity.

The publicity surrounding the funeral intensifies Lola’s sense that her family’s emotional life is artificial. Mayumi’s custom-designed Giovanni mourning dress, her carefully posed appearance on the most expensive sofa in the world, and her impassive expression make it impossible for Lola to determine whether her mother is grieving or merely performing the familiar version of herself. Lola initially tries to offer comfort and promises to remain as long as needed, but Mayumi rejects her presence and tells her to leave once she is finished grieving. The request converts bereavement into another form of expulsion: even at the funeral of Lola’s father, the daughter is treated as an unwelcome occupant rather than as family.

Lola’s decision to watch Mayumi’s press conference on E! News and then search for the speech online becomes a painful act of witnessing. She hopes to hear her mother mention her or acknowledge the family, but Mayumi discusses only her own coping, plans, and public identity. The televised image of Mayumi’s diamond-studded Versace sunglasses and the camera crew surrounding the brownstone contrasts with Lola’s invisibility. The final result is not closure but severance. Lola decides to cut all ties with her mother, while also confronting the material irony that she is the only child of two billionaires and still has to work to survive because her parents stopped supporting her at eighteen and Richard’s money and businesses were left in Mayumi’s name.

Grief, Memory, and the Search for an Emotional Home

Lola knows that no explanation or reconciliation will repair the relationship with her parents, so she abandons the hope of obtaining closure from Mayumi. The hospital, where she longs to return even on a Sunday, offers a sharper emotional contrast than the family home. Its subdued walls and practical silences feel safer because Lola expects no affection there. At home, she had expected love and received something closer to pocket money; at work, the absence of intimacy is at least honest and therefore less disappointing.

Bereavement sends Lola backward toward the memory of her grandmother, the family member who made her feel valued rather than tolerated. Her grandmother used to explain the Japanese saying “Tonbi ga taka wo umu,” or “A kite breeding a hawk,” by touching Lola’s cheek and telling her that it meant she was a splendid child born from common parents. The remembered gesture becomes an emotional counter-image to Mayumi’s disdain. The grandmother’s intermittent appearances and disappearances had made her elusive, but the memory of her words gives Lola a form of recognition that her parents never supplied.

The loss of the grandmother later proves more devastating because it removes the person Lola still imagined could teach her what she needed to know. The grandmother has been sleeping more each day, and Lola understands that death is approaching, yet this foreknowledge does not protect her. When Victoria and Viktor come to tell her that the grandmother has died, the news strikes her with the force of a wrecking ball. She feels as if her soul has been knocked out of her body and remembers little afterward except Viktor’s arms catching her as she falls. The scene makes bereavement physical: knowledge of an approaching death cannot prevent shock when the anticipated absence becomes real.

Immortality and the Erosion of Feeling

The Fort’s vampire society gives bereavement an altered temporal scale. Lola describes her brother Magnus as having lived for roughly a century or two before his room was reassigned underground, and she has not seen him for about ten years. In this world, decades and centuries have become ordinary units of family history, making ordinary human expectations of mourning difficult to sustain. She also describes Lady Mary, Victoria, and Charlotte as members of a fractured household whose histories stretch across incompatible eras.

Charlotte’s death is especially revealing. Trapped in childhood, Charlotte entered the garden about two decades earlier on a breezy summer day and walked into the sunlight. Her ashes went with the breeze, while only her clothes were recovered. Lola insists that she is not callous, but admits that after being alive for so many years, people become boring and their lives and deaths lose emotional force. She says that feelings for people can die even while the people remain alive, and that almost no one was troubled by Charlotte’s death except Mayumi, who fell into a deep depression and retreated to her room.

The family’s response to Charlotte’s death is grotesquely comic as well as tragic. Mayumi is repeatedly found hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling fan, embarrassed when discovered, while Richard suggests that she does not truly want to die because she could simply go outside during the day if death were her purpose. The scene turns suicidal behavior into a grim family routine, demonstrating how supernatural longevity has not abolished suffering but has made it repetitive, theatrical, and difficult to interpret. Richard’s statement that he has loved Lola enough for twenty lifetimes and has nothing more to give her further separates duration from emotional abundance. Immortality multiplies time, but it does not guarantee continuing tenderness.

Bereavement Inside the Harem

Lola’s grief is complicated by her captivity and developing attachment to Valnoir. Locked in the Harem basement, she learns from the women that most residents are vampires, while only some human women were forced into the arrangement and many have eventually adapted to it. Pregnant residents move to other floors and may choose to live as humans or vampires. This setting places bodily vulnerability, sexual dependency, reproduction, and emotional deprivation in the same institutional space, so Lola’s capacity to mourn cannot be separated from her struggle to understand whether Valnoir’s attention is genuine or temporary.

When Lola becomes ill and vomits in the Harem, the women’s knowing smiles and exchanged looks suggest that they recognize a significant change before she does. Valnoir wraps her in a bedspread, takes her upstairs, brings her food and drinks, and lies beside her. Their silence as they remain intertwined offers a brief form of care that contrasts with the rejection she experienced from Mayumi. Yet Lola remains wary of losing this attention, because a lifetime of deprivation has taught her to grasp at affection while expecting it to disappear. Her bereavement therefore includes an anticipatory dimension: every new attachment carries the fear of another abandonment.

That fear becomes explicit after the grandmother’s death. Valnoir attends the cremation but ignores Lola, refusing to look at or speak to her. Lola describes the resulting loneliness as frightening and feels her newly gained strength and resolve beginning to diminish. The contrast is severe: the grandmother’s death removes Lola’s emotional teacher, while Valnoir’s silence removes the immediate companion she hoped might help her endure it. Bereavement thus becomes both absence and relational uncertainty, intensified by the fact that the people around Lola possess the power to comfort her but repeatedly withhold it.

Meaning and Aftermath

The novel uses bereavement to test what survives when conventional family bonds fail. Richard’s death does not produce uncomplicated sorrow because his absence confirms how little presence he had offered in life. Mayumi’s public mourning turns grief into spectacle and leaves Lola feeling erased. Charlotte’s death shows the opposite extreme, in which centuries of existence have worn feeling down until only selected attachments remain capable of pain. The grandmother’s death then proves that Lola is not emotionally numb: beneath her sarcasm and defensive detachment, she can still be shattered by the loss of someone who made her feel seen.

The aftermath of mourning is not resolution. Lola cuts ties with Mayumi, returns emotionally toward the hospital, preserves her grandmother’s saying as a private inheritance, and struggles through the silence imposed by Valnoir. Bereavement changes the shape of her relationships rather than closing them. It makes neglect newly legible, exposes the difference between public performance and private care, and forces Lola to recognize that survival alone is not evidence of emotional strength. In a vampire world where centuries can pass and even ashes may scatter in the wind, grief remains the clearest proof that some bonds still matter.