Lost and Longing

Loss and longing in Turtles All the Way Down are not a problem the story resolves by teaching Aza Holmes to forget. They are a continuing condition of attachment: her father remains present through his phone and photographs, Davis becomes someone she loves and must miss, and even a life that moves forward carries those absences with it. The novel’s decisive turn is not from grief to its disappearance, but from fearing that love and missing are unbearable to recognizing that love is a gift, even when it cannot prevent separation.

The past kept in objects and images

Aza’s father’s death leaves an absence that remains active years later. His phone is not merely a storage device: Aza keeps it with a charging cord hidden in Harold’s trunk, next to the spare tire. The pictures could also be viewed on a computer or on backed-up hard drives, but using the phone matters because it is the object through which she had always encountered them, and because it still works eight years after her father’s body stopped working. The device gives memory a physical, repeatable form without making the loss reversible.

When Aza retrieves the phone from Harold’s trunk before meeting Daisy Ramirez at Applebee’s, she takes it out along with a tote bag containing money. Once it has charged enough to turn on, the home screen shows a photograph of Aza and her mother at Juan Solomon Park: seven-year-old Aza on a swing, leaning backward toward the camera. Her mother has said that Aza remembers the photographs rather than the events occurring when they were taken. Even so, Aza feels able to recall her father pushing her, his hand against her back, and the assurance that swinging away also meant swinging back. The photograph cannot prove that the memory is complete; its force lies in the connection it makes possible between an image, a remembered sensation, and a relationship that death has interrupted.

Her father’s photographs repeatedly include the sky divided by branches. Aza recognizes that same pattern while looking up through a dead tree’s bare limbs on the river, and remembers that many of her father’s pictures framed leafless branches against the sky. On the phone, the images show mostly what caught his attention: Aza, her mother, and that broken-up sky. They preserve not only the people he photographed but a way of seeing. Later, after Davis has driven her home, Aza goes to the garage for the phone and spends a long time scrolling through those branch-split skies. The act recurs because grief recurs; the pictures offer contact with her father’s attention without pretending he is still there to provide it.

Memory as continuing attachment

At Applebee’s, Aza chooses one of her father’s blurred self-portraits, taken with a friend at a Pacers game, and speaks to him. She tells him that she has come into some money, that she will try to do right by it, and that she misses him. This is a small but consequential form of address: she brings a present decision and a present feeling into the relationship she still has with her dead father. The phone makes that conversation imaginable, but the scene does not suggest that the object answers her or restores the person she has lost.

Aza’s attachment to the photographs also develops into an understanding of what they are made of. Looking at distant starlight with Davis, she thinks about the comfort of turning toward light that left its star years earlier. As time catches up with one favorite star, another can be found farther away; the old light offers a way to look toward what preceded the present. She connects that experience to her father’s pictures and understands photographs in the same terms: as light and time. The comparison gives memory both its beauty and its limit. A photograph can carry light from an earlier moment into the present, but it cannot stop time or return that moment intact.

Love, separation, and the work of going on

The relation between love and absence becomes especially clear in Aza’s bond with Davis. Beneath the night sky, she takes his hand and feels the possibility of loving him, while remaining uncertain about what to call the feeling. Their grief resembles one another because their hearts are broken in similar places, but shared loss does not make the relationship simple or guarantee that it can continue. The scene holds tenderness beside uncertainty rather than using one to cancel the other.

After the relationship ends, Aza initially checks her phone for Davis’s reply. Gradually, she understands that they will belong to each other’s past, but this recognition does not erase her missing him. She also misses her father and Harold, and her sense of absence widens beyond one relationship. The narrative makes a distinction between continuing and being cured: over the following months Aza gets better without ever quite getting well. She and Daisy start a Mental Health Alliance and a Fan-Fiction Workshop, though the two of them are the only members of either club, and spend many evenings together at Daisy’s apartment, Applebee’s, or Aza’s house. These ordinary activities do not undo grief or make every day easy. They show life taking shape beside it, in friendship, shared work, movies, homework, and conversation.

The perspective of the future

The novel gives longing an additional dimension through the difference between what Aza feels beneath the sky and what a later version of her knows. In the earlier moment, she imagines loving Davis for the rest of her life and fears being stuck missing him, as if the feeling might become a permanent trap. The later narration can see that the girl beneath that sky will go on: she will grow up and have children, become too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then become sick again. That future does not invalidate the fear or promise a smooth recovery. It changes the frame around it by showing that a life can contain repeated illness and still continue beyond the moment that seems final.

The future self also remembers the instruction to write down how she got there. Writing turns experience into a record that can be revisited, much as her father’s photographs preserve earlier light. Yet its significance is not that it closes the past or makes every loss intelligible. Instead, Aza’s retrospective understanding alters the meaning she gives to loving and missing Davis: love is neither a tragedy nor a failure, but a gift. The conclusion preserves the ache of separation while refusing to treat that ache as proof that the relationship was mistaken.

Significance

The idea that to be alive is to be missing gathers the novel’s different forms of absence without reducing them to one another. Aza’s father is dead; Davis becomes part of her past; the familiar car Harold is also missed; and Aza’s later life includes illness and renewed difficulty. These losses differ in circumstance, but each makes attachment visible through what is no longer available in the same way. Missing someone is not presented as evidence that a person has failed to move on. It is one way the past continues to matter in a life that is still unfolding.

The book’s images of old light and photographs give this idea a material shape. Both carry traces of what has already happened into a later moment, but neither reverses time. Aza’s father’s phone remains usable, his pictures remain viewable, and her memories remain meaningful; none of these facts restores him. Likewise, the end of Aza’s relationship with Davis does not cancel the love she felt. The novel therefore locates hope not in forgetting, permanent wellness, or an ending that removes pain, but in the possibility of continuing to live, remember, and love while absence remains part of the story.