“I can’t undo anything. I’m still paying his phone bill, just to hear his voicemail. A copy of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is still facedown and spread-eagled on the bedside table, partially read. I can’t even declutter all the sticky notes he left strewn all over the house and through my car and in my handbag.”

The first page of the book sets up the image of Kate being trapped in grief, surrounded by memories of her husband that she can’t bear to part with. The passage introduces the notes that will become a theme and plot point, communicating a great deal of exposition in a few images.

“Never speak ill of the dead, Kate. It’s another impossible standard to which widows are held while they slip and falter across the unstable ice of grief, hoping it will hold.”

The metaphor of thin ice captures Kate’s fragility in the early half of the book as she navigates her grief, always feeling like everything is about to give way. She feels guilty for her occasional feelings of anger and resentment, which is characteristic of the bereaved, one of the ways the book, despite being largely a romance, deals realistically with grief.

“That’s the problem with grief. It’s not packed tidily in a box that you can bring out in appropriate, private moments and sort through. It’s threaded inconveniently through everything.”

The early chapters work hard to show how much Kate is still grieving, weaving memories of Cam into nearly every observation and reaction that Kate has. This establishes Cam as still present in her life and shows her as weighed down by her feelings of loss. Her Different Kinds of Grief and Bereavement present a realistic representation of how grief and loss work in real life.