Death and Grief

The author establishes this theme through the depiction of several characters grieving a loss to demonstrate the uniformity of this experience, despite individual circumstances. Three stories, “Hill of Hell,” “Cult of Mary,” and “Volcano House,” revolve around characters grieving for a death that has not yet occurred. In “Hill of Hell,” grief is referred to as “the big alone” (39), a notion that resonates with the narrator because she feels unable to explain to others the connection between her grief after the death of her first baby many years earlier and the coming loss of her adult daughter to cancer. In “The Cult of Mary,” the narrator struggles to make the most of a trip to Italy with her mother, knowing that she is going to die soon and the trip will likely be their last. She wonders poignantly, “how could any trip, no matter...