Loss and Grief

Many of the characters in the collection struggle with challenges of loss and grief, as the narratives highlight both the painful and universal nature of these types of experiences. For example, in the story “White Dancing Elephants,” the narrator struggles not only with the pain of grief, but also with her own personal reactions of denial. The narrator acknowledges that she has probably had a miscarriage, but she still clings to the hope that the pregnancy might sill be viable: “You could be alive. The hard thing could be from inside of me. A piece of fibroid, a tumor from inside my uterus that my body was smart enough to get rid of to make room for you” (11). By the end of the story, the narrator has not necessarily moved on from this liminal state between denial and acceptance, as her process of grief...