Opening
In these closing chapters, Tiger Tolliver writes in a composition book and learns to live with absence rather than fight it. Her nights in a church basement, quiet dinners with her sister, and a circle of mourners teach her that grief reshapes life—and that survival means making peace with the dark parts. The section ends with a final act of love: a corrected obituary that reclaims both her mother and herself.
What Happens
Chapter 56: I'm writing this down because someday I will be Alice
Tiger shifts to a reflective, first-person voice, explaining she’s journaling because her grief-group leader, Felice, says it helps. On Thursday nights she and Lupe Hidalgo meet in a church basement with twenty-seven people who pass around worn teddy bears and try to name their Grief and Loss. Felice once asked, “What would you say to your loved one, if you had just one more chance, just one?” While others murmured “I love you” and “I forgive you,” Tiger stayed quiet, remembering her last words to her mother—“Please come back. Please don’t leave me.”—a memory braided with Guilt and Forgiveness.
An elderly woman named Alice, who lost her mother at ten, offers the line that lodges in Tiger’s chest: she would ask her mother to “Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you.” Tiger realizes she will one day be an old woman, too, who has spent a lifetime without her mother. Outside group, Tiger is building a new rhythm with her sister, Shayna Lee Franklin: while Tiger meets with mourners, Shayna goes to AA nearby, and afterward they share quiet Denny’s dinners—a small, steady unit of Family and Found Family. A glimpse of a horse farm stirs a fierce pull back to riding, a love she inherits from June Tolliver.
At her huge new high school, Tiger wonders how many kids are stitching lives from scraps, like her and Thaddeus Roach, “cobbling together families with what we’ve been given.” She carries a grungy teddy bear missing an eye and a leg, a small, threadbare comfort that mirrors her own patched-together self. She quotes Beckett—“You must go on. / I can’t go on. / You must go on.”—and distills the book’s credo on Resilience and Survival: “You have to make friends with the dark.” Seeing herself as a “third girl,” “crawling out of the jar, but keeping her wings close,” she marks a quiet step in Identity and Coming of Age.
Chapter 57: June Frances Tolliver passed away
In group, the night’s question is whether the dead visit in dreams. Phil, a tough man with a rough past, breaks down as he describes his mother—lost to cancer—smiling and eating a giant barrel of vanilla ice cream, finally painless. Trisha shares a dream where her wheelchair-bound mother walks again, then goes to find her other deceased daughter. The room breathes easier: in these dreams, the dead are whole.
Tiger hasn’t seen her mother in a dream, except for the video on her phone. She imagines her mom busy reuniting with family or simply trusting that Tiger can manage, and she believes her group would accept the story of the video without question. The hope that death returns what was taken—health, family, small joys—becomes a lifeline.
The book closes with Tiger’s formal obituary for her mother, a reclamation of language and love. She corrects the record—“She is survived by her daughter, Grace Maria Tolliver”—and ends with an eternal benediction: “June was loved, now and forever.”
Character Development
Tiger steps out of raw shock into reflective steadiness. She asks new questions, seeks structure, and allows help to hold her up while she learns to hold herself.
- Tiger (Grace): Moves from pleading for reversal to practicing endurance; crafts a philosophy for living with grief; integrates her past and present by naming herself Grace in the obituary.
- Shayna: A quiet anchor pursuing her own recovery; their regular dinners and parallel meetings become the blueprint for a durable, chosen family.
- Lupe: A faithful companion in grief whose presence embodies Friendship as shared stamina rather than quick fixes.
- Alice: A mirror of Tiger’s future, modeling how loss stretches across a lifetime yet still allows for clarity and tenderness.
Themes & Symbols
Grief and Loss expand from emergency to companionship; Tiger learns grief isn’t cured but carried. Resilience and Survival become a choice enacted in small routines—writing, showing up, eating together—while Identity and Coming of Age surface in Tiger’s self-naming and her image of the “third girl” testing new wings. Family and Found Family widens to include a sister in recovery, a roomful of mourners, and even a maimed teddy bear passed from hand to hand.
Symbols deepen this shift. The dark changes from terror to terrain: something to befriend, navigate, and sometimes rest within. The obituary serves as a formal rite of reclamation, letting Tiger author both her mother’s memory and her own name. The damaged teddy bear reflects a body and heart that feel incomplete yet still comfort and are comforted. Dream visitations offer a gentle theology of release, where pain loosens and the dead regain what was lost.
Key Quotes
“What would you say to your loved one, if you had just one more chance, just one?”
Felice’s question reframes grief from backward-looking regret to forward-looking truth-telling. It asks Tiger to consider the words that would guide her, not just the words that would undo the past.
“Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you.”
Alice articulates the lifelong horizon of loss. The request becomes a template for Tiger’s own journal: instructions for living, not for forgetting.
“You must go on. / I can’t go on. / You must go on.”
The Beckett lines capture the paradox at the core of survival—impossibility and necessity held together. Tiger adopts this cadence as a mantra for daily persistence.
“You have to make friends with the dark.”
This sentence names the book’s thesis. Instead of battling grief, Tiger chooses relationship with it—an approach that makes endurance possible.
“She is survived by her daughter, Grace Maria Tolliver… June was loved, now and forever.”
By correcting her name, Tiger unites who she was with who she is becoming. The closing declaration transforms an obituary into a love letter that outlives death.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters function as an epilogue that trades chaos for cadence. The narrative’s shift to a reflective first person shows Tiger has gained enough distance to narrate, organize, and own her experience. The grief group’s stories, Shayna’s recovery, and the small ritual of Denny’s create a scaffold Tiger can climb.
Most importantly, the section crystallizes the book’s argument: healing is not erasure but integration. By befriending the dark, writing the obituary, and claiming the name Grace, Tiger carries her mother forward while stepping into a future she authors herself.