The Last Love Note: A Novel

“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.

“‘You know I’m on top of this,’ I say, even though right now I am most certainly not on top of it. Not any of it. [Hugh would] be alarmed if he knew how out of control I really feel—about everything.”

The opening scene, where Charlie finds a grenade, is comedic and provides an opportunity for a meet-cute with Justin. It also introduces Hugh’s role in Kate’s life. The image of the live grenade that needs special handling is a metaphor for Kate’s fragile emotional state, too.

“I feel more alive right now than I’ve felt in years. Maybe it’s because, on the back of this bike, I feel closer to death than I ever have before. A fraction of a second of lost concentration is all that lies between Cam and me. Such a fine line. Infinitesimal.”

Sunk in her grief, Kate often imagines how she can get close to Cam, and her dying is one way, which she pictures happening while riding with Justin on his motorcycle. But the excitement of riding the bike also wakes her up and makes her feel alive, something her grief hasn’t allowed her to do. This step outside her usual routine is Kate’s first motion toward coming out of her grief and coming back to life.

“They say it’s just like having a second child, falling in love again. That when you’ve lost a partner, you can eventually love two people at the same time. But the idea of that is so distant from me right now that I can’t accept it as true or understand how it would work.”

When the story begins, Kate is not ready for nor interested in new love; she feels that her love for Cam was exclusive. The analogy of having a second child, though, is a model for love that Kate can understand, though here she is still reluctant to conceive of it being possible for her.

“Having a baby really knocked the wind from my sails. It took us years of trying before Charlie finally came along. Infertility shredded my confidence, and eventually the complicated process of bringing a baby into the world just sort of swallowed me whole.”

These images of shredding, swallowing, and being knocked off course are all vivid metaphors for the struggle Kate feels in being a mother. She feels inadequate because the process was difficult for her, and this causes her worry when she becomes pregnant again, adding to the emotional obstacles and inner conflict that she undergoes as a character.

“This accident is the universe’s way of forcing me to face facts. There is something very wrong here. We’re about to be put in two separate ambulances and carted off to the hospital and that’s when they’re going to find it: the thing in Cam’s brain that has been gradually stealing my husband from me, one little slipup at a time.”

Following the car accident, this bit of foreshadowing adds emotional weight to the dramatic moment. As the reader already knows Cam dies, this passage sets up suspense about what the diagnosis will turn out to be, giving the reader a small mystery to solve.

“I take a seat and flick through pages of ‘inspiring’ interviews with ‘brave’ women who’ve made it through unimaginable tragedy. I do not want to join them. I’m not the heroic type. I’m more the falling-in-a-heap type.”

Emma Grey uses contrast here and a humorous, self-deprecating tone from Kate to heighten the pathos of her situation in this moment when she knows Cam is sick but doesn’t know why. Hugh is her support in this scene, laying ground for her trust in and reliance on him.

“His remorse over failing this test is the single most tragic moment I’ve ever witnessed. My blood runs cold as I feel our relationship slipping away from us already, ushering in a bleak new reality that’s dark and confusing and something I don’t feel remotely equipped to handle.”

In a moment of premonition, Kate realizes when Cam fails the memory tests at the hospital that this is the beginning of a long ending for them. This language of slipping away repeats and strengthens the earlier image of Cam being stolen from her, bit by bit.

“This is horrible—this grieving somebody while they’re still here. Grieving a beautiful relationship that had decades of richness left in it, knowing what we have now will gradually be downgraded to some unutterable situation.”

In showing how she began to grieve Cam at the onset of his illness, this passage illustrates the length and depth of Kate’s grief, which began long before Cam’s physical death. This mention of grief also alludes to the grief burdening Kate in the current moment of the story, to which the narrative is about to return after this set of flashbacks.

“I want to bottle him and bring him out in every other moment when life feels treacherous. The way I always do with Cam’s notes.”

Kate’s reaction to Hugh’s calmness during the fraught plane ride shows her need to depend on other people and how much she craves someone to lean on. She reveals here how Cam’s notes to her have been a source of emotional support, like an antidote to her suffering.

“Grief […] is rushing to the surface safely in Charlie’s absence. I can’t upset him from here. Can’t scare him. I can fully lose it and he won’t know. I feel like I’ve never had this much space, nor this much emotion to tip into it.”

During the time Kate is in Ballina, the waves and water become metaphors for the way emotion is overwhelming her. The removal to a new setting gives her space to confront these feelings. The shower, a more contained setting than the waves at the beach, is one way Kate tries to relieve her powerful emotions.

“There’s so much more I want to cover. […] Cam’s notes, and the fact that they’re not scaffolding after all. They’re a cage—and sometime soon, I need to break free.”

On her weekend away, outside her normal life, Kate keeps having epiphanies about her recent experience, and this realization that keeping Cam’s notes has caged her in is an important one for her character development. What turned into emotional support through her grief journey has, she now realizes, been holding her back from healing.

“What people don’t get is the wound is always exposed. You can’t be reminded of something when it’s all you think about.”

This passage, which occurs when Kate is having a conversation with a new person who stumbles when she admits she is widowed, shows how Grey realistically portrays the presence of grief and the way it infuses everything, especially how a bereaved person feels the wound is always open.

“There are none of Cam’s colorful labels here. No notes on the bedside table, not even being used as bookmarks. Just the perfectly blank slate of crisp white linen. Clean lines, no creases.”

The absence of Cam’s notes in the beach house gives Kate a metaphorical reprieve from her grief. When she can step away from Cam—and her grief—she begins healing. The tidily made bed at the cottage represents a clean, fresh start that is possible with Hugh, nothing mussed about it yet.

“The emptiness of that blank page that was so confronting two years ago is starting to feel like this delicious invitation to write the next part of my story. A tantalizing glimpse of how it might look to have purpose and forward momentum into a new life.”

Kate’s getting in touch with her ambitions as a writer becomes, symbolically, a way of handling her grief. She imagines the future as a creative endeavor—a story she could write—rather than a circuit of grief scripted for her.

“I can’t even articulate where [Hugh] fits in my world—part boss, part support person, part friend […] At least, I thought that’s what we were, but I think my relationship barometer is faulty.”

The flashbacks in the novel map out a developing emotional connection between Kate and Hugh, which Kate finally acknowledges when they are together at the beach. The flashbacks rewrite Kate’s connection with Cam, showing her developing a primary relationship with Hugh. This creates a tension with the character arc Kate thinks she is experiencing.

“I’ve seen more sunrises since Cam died than I’d seen in my life up till then. They’re a promise; no matter how bad everything is, the world keeps turning.”

The sunrise she witnesses at the beach symbolizes Kate’s reawakening to her own self and her own desires. The new day is a metaphorical threshold as she begins to envision a future that involves a life without Cam.

“I hope he realizes what he’s dealing with here: a widow’s heart. It’s just like a normal heart, but it’s made of a million shattered fragments, patched together in a mosaic. Reclaimed glass. Transparent. Easily broken.”

When she realizes she cares for Hugh, Kate uses this metaphor to describe her heart, which she feels can never really be whole again after losing Cam. The image captures that she still feels emotionally fragile, just as Hugh perceived.

“It occurs to me that Hugh and I, perhaps for the longest time, have been involved in a dance, choreographed by my grief. It’s been me leading it, every step of the way. Always choosing the music. Always picking the pace.”

This image of the two of them involved in a dance helps Kate realize how connected she has been to Hugh. The metaphor of them as a dance couple cements their romantic attraction and suggests they would be compatible, but the lack of music symbolizes that Kate doesn’t know where the relationship is headed at this point.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so…silenced. Two men and a secret so impenetrable it survives death. Hugh had better armor up, fast, because half of my rage has nowhere to go.”

This image of the secret as a wall between them represents how Kate feels that Hugh’s keeping secret Cam’s last request is going to drive them apart. Kate perceives this conflict as a battle she will have to fight with Hugh, because she can’t accuse Cam, who isn’t there.

“This is a long goodbye. I’ve been losing Cam in pieces, each progression taking part of him from me by stealth.”

This image, which takes place when Kate is spending Cam’s last moments with him, refers not just to his illness but also her grieving process. Even before he died, Kate felt her husband being stolen from her as he changed from the man she’d known.

“‘You won’t ever feel completely mine,’ I explain. ‘I will never be completely yours. How does that even work?’”

Kate and Hugh’s romance works against the conventional fictions about romance in that because they have both lost someone they loved, they won’t feel the sense of completion with another person as ideals of “true” love would have it. Theirs is a new, adult love that has to conform to their own pasts and identities.