Death, Grief, and Guilt

In The Unpassing, Chia-Chia Lin closely examines the formative role that grief can play in childhood, and explores how it can alter family dynamics. As each character has their own journey through grief, the novel navigates through the different pressures each character faces.

By focusing the narrative on Gavin, Lin chooses to explore the aftermath of a sudden death in the family from the vantage point of a ten-year-old. Because Gavin is so young, Ruby’s death is also his first close encounter with death. As the novel progresses, he encounters death again many times: most notably his mother’s death at the end of the novel and Pei-Pei’s brush with death when she gets hypothermia, but also the deaths of flying squirrels, a whale, and a lynx. In order to process Ruby’s death, he needs to process the concept of...