Content Warning: This section contains discussion of suicide, mental illness, sexual assault, and anti-gay language.

Biz says grief is like the urge to “lay your head down on the table where you are” (100) and never look back up. This expresses both the weight of grief and its allure because one can lose oneself in it. Biz struggles with these complex dynamics because, in addition to grief, she struggles with her developing sexual identity and a psychiatric condition that ultimately requires medication.

At the heart of Biz’s grief is the death of her father. One of the reasons she holds his presence so close—to the point that she visualizes his ghost—is that she identifies with him. When Biz was young, her father was a warm, vibrant person, but he also masked a steadily growing feeling of vulnerability and the inability to stay in control of events. Because of the suddenness of her father’s death and because it so completely lacked a satisfying explanation, Biz struggles to understand why she is alive. In the opening pages, when she cannot sleep, Biz places her hand over her heart and reassures herself with its steady beat: “It beatbeats beatbeatbeats skipsabeatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeats” (4). However, other times, she tries to exist somewhere between life and death, as when she imagines a multiverse in which she is and is not dead.