Grief and Loss in How to Make Friends with the Dark
What This Theme Explores
Grief and Loss in How to Make Friends with the Dark asks what happens when the person who anchors your world disappears—and whether identity, love, and home can be rebuilt from the wreckage. For Tiger Tolliver, loss is not an emotion but a geography she must learn to survive within. The sudden death of her mother, June Tolliver, explodes into anger, guilt, and numbness, refusing the tidy arc of “moving on.” The novel insists that grief is not a problem to solve; it is a companion one must learn to live with.
How It Develops
At the outset, grief appears as a shadow of possibility, seeded by everyday friction between a daughter reaching for independence and a mother holding tight. A fight about freedom and a school dance hardens into a moment Tiger can’t take back—her anger toward Kai Henderson and the phone call with June become the fault lines that later crack open under loss (Chapter 1-5 Summary). The novel frames this “before” not as innocence, but as a prelude to the guilt that will braid itself through Tiger’s grief.
When loss arrives, it is visceral. Tiger’s body revolts; her mind blanks; language fails. The story moves from homes and routines into thresholds and institutions—hospitals, funeral parlors, paperwork—where the clinical language of death collides with raw emotion. Grief multiplies as Tiger is uprooted from home and swept into the machinery of the foster care system, amplifying abandonment and disorientation (Chapter 6-10 Summary). Anger flashes outward; depression closes in; Tiger begins to feel like a spectator to her own life, a “girl-bug in a jar” tapping against glass.
In the final movement, grief does not recede so much as change shape. Community—other grieving teens in the GG—punctures Tiger’s isolation, giving her language for feelings that once seemed unspeakable. Discovery of her sister, Shayna Lee Franklin, complicates the idea of family and offers a future not free of pain, but capable of holding it. A final message from June and the steady presence of peers shift grief from an obliterating force to a constant companion, allowing Tiger to begin living alongside it (Chapter 36-40 Summary).
Key Examples
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The Hospital Scene: Tiger’s immediate response—vomiting, shaking, insisting “the woman on the bed … is not my mother”—shows grief cracking the bond between perception and reality. Denial isn’t avoidance; it’s a protective reflex that buys the psyche time. By making the body the first narrator of grief, the novel grounds loss in sensation before meaning.
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The Final Phone Call: The last words Tiger screams to June—“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”—become a shard she can’t stop turning. Guilt fuses with grief, making mourning feel like punishment rather than love. This unresolved conflict ensures that acceptance must include forgiving the self, not just missing the other.
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The Viewing and the Ashes: Touching June’s waxen skin and later receiving the “Boxes of Mom” drag grief from abstraction into matter. The weight and awkwardness of the boxes literalize how loss must be carried, not solved. Tiger’s need to keep them close dramatizes the tug-of-war between holding on and learning to let go.
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The Death Certificates: Official documents and a 911 transcript reduce a life to lines and checkboxes, revealing how bureaucracy can re-traumatize even as it confirms the truth. Tiger’s call to the medical examiner—seeking reassurance her mother did not suffer—shows how facts become talismans against spiraling “what-ifs” (Chapter 31-35 Summary).
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The Grief Group (GG): Hearing other teens’ stories reframes Tiger’s singular pain as shared human experience. Mae-Lynn Carpenter names the “Big Suck,” giving language to the way loss saturates everything; Lupe Hidalgo complicates grief with anger after a sibling’s suicide, showing how the manner of death shapes mourning. Community doesn’t fix grief; it teaches you how to bear it.
“I walk around like my skin’s been removed, cooked, and put back on me. That’s how I feel. Like a walking piece of hot, bloody meat.” —Mae-Lynn Carpenter
Character Connections
Tiger Tolliver: Tiger’s arc traces grief’s unruly currents—shock, denial, rage that spills into slapping Ellen Untermeyer, guilt that loops back to the final phone call, and depressive withdrawal that blurs days. Her turning point isn’t epiphany but companionship: being seen by others who know grief’s language. Healing begins when she stops arguing with grief’s existence and starts negotiating how to live with it.
The Grief Group (GG): As a chorus, the group embodies grief’s plurality. Mae-Lynn offers the perspective of anticipatory grief and the disorienting transition from “Sick Life” to “Grief Life.” Taran and Alif Parker carry the aftershocks of sudden loss while shouldering a surviving parent’s pain, modeling how grief redistributes family roles. Lupe’s fury and heartbreak after a sibling’s suicide insist that grief can be abrasive, politically charged, and still wholly valid.
Shayna Lee Franklin: Shayna’s hardened armor forms out of layered losses—of a father to addiction and prison, of a family to betrayal, of a child to circumstance. Her guardedness shows grief’s long half-life when unacknowledged; her wary bond with Tiger proves that connection can grow even in soil salted by disappointment. Together, the sisters suggest that “family” after loss is something forged, not found.
Symbolic Elements
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The Lace Dress: Once the spark of a fight, it becomes Tiger’s wearable shrine—armor, penance, and tether. Wearing it until it frays externalizes how she clings to the last moment with June, unresolved and raw. Taking it off isn’t forgetting; it’s consent to carry memory without self-punishment.
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The Dark: The title’s metaphor recasts grief as a space, not an adversary. “Making friends” with it implies accommodation, curiosity, even tenderness toward what hurts—a radical refusal of the cliché that time heals on its own.
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The Boxes of Mom: Heavy, awkward, divisible—these boxes capture how loss is both too much and not enough. Keeping them close reveals Tiger’s fear that distance equals disloyalty; learning to place them in the world mirrors her shifting relationship to absence.
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The Girl-Bug in a Jar: This image distills dissociation: observed but unheard, alive but contained. The jar’s glass is both barrier and magnifier, suggesting how trauma can isolate while making every sensation too bright, too loud.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel speaks directly to a moment when teen grief and mental health are often privatized or pathologized. By refusing a tidy “stage model” and honoring ugly, contradictory feelings, it validates survivors who don’t fit sanitized scripts. Its attention to institutional forces—the churn of the foster care system, the coldness of bureaucratic death—exposes how social structures can compound private pain. Most urgently, it champions peer support and communal language for sorrow, reminding readers that healing isn’t linear but relational.
Essential Quote
“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”
These words crystallize grief’s cruel echo: the line said in anger becomes the sentence Tiger serves after June’s death. The quote fuses love and rage, showing how guilt can colonize mourning and make memory feel treacherous. The novel’s work is to transform this razor-edged refrain into something survivable—an admission of imperfection that grief can hold without erasing love.