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Summary
Chapter 23 and Bones
Chapter 23
Ray and Ruth return to Ray’s house and, in the middle of the night, he reads her journals, which document her encounters with the dead.
Jack is happy to go home. Buckley pushes his wheelchair, flanked by Abigail and Lindsey.
As she bakes a pie for the Salmons, Ruana thinks about her plan to divorce her absent husband. She gives Ruth and Ray breakfast and invites them to join her in dropping off the pie. Ruth demurs.
Hal brings Buckley’s drum set. Grandma Lynn gets water for everyone, and Susie reflects on how much she loves her Grandma Lynn now. Lynn is happy that her daughter is coming home and thinks she spies a girl in old-fashioned clothes in the yard.
As the car with Jack, Buckley, and Abigail arrives, Susie wonders if she’s been waiting for her family to come home to one another, rather than to her. Lindsey asks her mother if she is going to leave again, and Abigail promises to try not to. Buckley adores his drums. Alone in Susie’s room, Abigail says she loves her, words Susie has longed to hear. Abigail notices the picture that her daughter took of her. She takes a bath and thinks about her mother and about acceptance. Susie, too, is thinking about acceptance.
The extended family is together and happy, sipping champagne. In heaven, Susie reflects on the beautiful world that has been created, which her death made possible. Ray and Ruana arrive and join the party, while Ruth walks alone in the cornfield. Later, Samuel talks about the old rundown house he loves and learns that Ruth’s father has bought it, along with other old houses slated for demolition. Susie slips away.
Bones
Susie explains that the living generally don’t notice when the dead leave. Only those close to death might have a faint awareness of it. A few years later, Grandma Lynn dies, although Susie has yet to see her in heaven. She still watches her family sometimes and knows they think of her. Lindsey and Samuel marry and live in the house he lovingly renovates. Lindsey studies to be a therapist and, one day, discovers she is pregnant.
People might believe that heaven is a place of safety, but for Susie it is instead a place of fun, as when she helps the garden grow for her family. Ray becomes a doctor who understands that death is not the end, and Ruth continues to look for a way to explain what she knows, which is that the dead are with the living and talk to them.
Susie’s heaven changes to what she calls “wide wide Heaven,” which is defined by the presence of all the most satisfying comforts. From this place, she finally witnesses Harvey’s death. He exits a bus in New Hampshire and approaches a young woman he wants to kill. Over her head are icicles and, after she walks off, one of the icicles falls, throwing Harvey off balance. He tumbles down a ravine and is buried under the snow.
Lindsey and Samuel are in their garden with their baby, Abigail Suzanne. A few miles away, a man shows his wife Susie’s charm bracelet, which had been unearthed by construction. She remarks that the little girl must be grown up by now. Susie notes that she is almost grown up, but not quite, and wishes everyone a happy and long life.
Analysis
Snow falls at significant moments throughout the novel. It swirls around the penguin in the snow globe, and it is snowing both on the night of Susie’s murder and when her father first senses Harvey’s guilt. Susie feels a special pang in heaven when she realizes she will never again run under the snow. Finally, the souls of the dead are likened to snowflakes, each seemingly the same but all unique. It is thus fitting that the end of Susie’s hunt for Harvey occurs in the snow. After falling into the ravine, Harvey is covered by snow for months. More crucial, though, is the manner of his death. Although he is stalking another young woman, Harvey’s increasing social precarity means she eludes him easily. Here too there is poetic justice, for, in Chapter 10, Susie admits that the icicle is always her preferred weapon when she plays the murder game in heaven. That she was able to fulfill one of her chief desires—to protect women and girls by guaranteeing that Harvey could never hurt anyone again—brings closure to one part of her story.
The reconstruction of her family also enables Susie to accept her death. In these chapters, not only does she see her estranged family coming together again with love, but she is likewise able to realize that they have become the people they now are because of her death. Her tragic death, then, is not just an absence, but rather the structure on which something new has been built. By using the image of the body, Susie stresses that this new configuration is living and belongs fully to the Earth. It is not that she has been forgotten, but rather that her loss no longer defines everything for her family. They can leave her alone and she, in turn, can do the same. Although everyone in the novel has mourned in their own ways, they come together on Earth and in heaven in acceptance, the process as complete as it will ever be. Now Susie can define heaven as a place of fun, not of loneliness or frustration or limitation.
The discovery of her charm bracelet, thrown away by Harvey shortly after her murder, shows how extensive the possible points of contact are for any person’s life. The woman who sees the charm bracelet imagines a life for the child who owned it, speculating that this girl must now be a woman. This statement both is and is not true. While Susie never had the chance to grow up on Earth, she does mature in heaven. Over the years, she learns how to decenter her feelings for the sake of her family and to recognize that there are mysteries that cannot be resolved. While it might be possible to get some measure of justice, there is an equal degree of comfort in sharing one’s story and supporting others in pain. When she wishes everyone a long life, Susie acknowledges without bitterness that life is itself a gift, in many ways better than the pleasures one can experience in heaven. Although it begins in a kind of hell, and ends literally in heaven, the novel’s hopeful final message is that our communal life can be itself a heaven on earth.
