Managing Loss

"Spirit" is a poem in the collection Jane: A Murder, in which Maggie Nelson tells the story of the murder of her aunt, Jane, that occurred in 1969. Jane's murder is officially unsolved, and Nelson's family has had to grapple with this lack or resolution for decades. The collection as a whole is focused both on the mystery of what happened to Jane and, more pointedly, on the way the tragedy affected Nelson's family. In "Spirit," the conversations that Nelson dramatizes paint a portrait of a family who, many years later, are still grieving the loss of their loved one.

The first implication of this grief is when the speaker's mother tells her, at the beginning of the poem, that the spirit of Jane "lives on" through her. Given the context in which the collection was written, it is likely that the speaker's mother is also...