Grief and Loss in Call Me Athena

The Unstoppable Fire: Grief as a Metaphor

In the opening lines of Call Me Athena, protagonist Mary describes grief as a brush fire that starts with a single cinder. She imagines trying to smother it, only to watch it spread across the grass, growing a will of its own. The metaphor is relentless: grief “changes everything in its path” and leaves the speaker helpless, holding a “useless bucket”. This image establishes grief not as a passing emotion but as an elemental force that transforms the landscape of a life. The field burning is both literal and symbolic — Mary’s world is consumed by loss before any specific event is narrated. The fire becomes a character in itself, one that cannot be reasoned with or extinguished. By placing this reflection at the very start of the novel, Colby Cedar Smith signals that grief is the emotional ground upon which the entire story stands.

Grief Through Generations: The Author’s Loss

The Author’s Note shifts focus from Mary’s fictional grief to the real loss that inspired the book. Smith writes that her grandmother Mary died at 92 after Alzheimer’s erased her memories. The storyteller who could “hold an entire room” gradually forgot everything about her life. This is a second kind of grief — the slow burning away of identity and history. Smith never knew her great-grandparents Giorgos and Jeanne, so she reconstructed their journeys from a few historical documents and oral traditions. Her grief is not for people she met, but for the stories she cannot fully recover. The RMS Olympic manifest — which includes Smith’s own first name in the porter’s handwriting — becomes a tangible connection to a past that is otherwise lost. Here, grief is creative: it drives the author to listen to “voices” and to write a narrative where the dead can speak again. Yet the note acknowledges that “the same story was never the same twice,” hinting at the impossibility of capturing loss in any fixed form.

Complexity and Contradiction: Grief as Both Destructive and Generative

The brush fire metaphor emphasizes destruction, but the book itself is an act of preservation. Smith’s grandmother Mary, despite her misfortune, “never let her misfortune hold her back” and became a successful businesswoman in the 1950s. The grief of her family’s poverty and the loss of her mother’s stories (from Alzheimer’s) did not keep her from summoning courage. This tension — between consuming grief and resilient action — runs through the novel. Mary’s father, a Greek immigrant, and her mother, a French immigrant, also carried losses from their homelands. The brush fire symbol recurs: it can destroy a field, but a field also regrows after fire. Similarly, the author’s grief for her grandmother becomes the foundation for a book that keeps Mary’s spirit alive. The Alzheimer’s that erased memory is countered by the written word. This is the central complexity of grief in Call Me Athena: it is an ending that also begins something new, a loss that demands creation.

Grief Across the Family Tapestry

Though the plot details beyond the opening are not fully supplied, the characters mentioned in the author’s note and the character pages point to a family shaped by grief. Mary’s twin sister likely represents a shared burden of loss. The father and mother each left their countries — a grief for homeland that never fully heals. The author’s note reveals that Smith changed actual events, choosing to keep the RMS Olympic because of its history. This selective remembering is another layer of grief: we cannot preserve everything, so we must choose what to carry forward. The photograph of Mary wiggling her foot — considered a “failure” by Jeanette — becomes precious precisely because it captures an unrepeatable moment. Grief, in this reading, is not only about death but about the irrevocable passage of time.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the brush fire metaphor in Chapter 1 define Mary’s relationship with grief?
   The metaphor presents grief as uncontrollable and self-willed. Mary’s attempts to stomp out the cinder fail, and she is left holding a useless bucket. This suggests that grief cannot be managed or denied; it must be endured as a force of nature that alters everything.

2. What does the Author’s Note reveal about the real loss behind the novel?
   Smith’s grandmother Mary died after Alzheimer’s erased her memories. The note shows that grief extends beyond death to the loss of stories and identity. Smith wrote the book to revive those stories, turning personal grief into a creative act.

3. How does the RMS Olympic manifest function as a symbol of grief?
   The manifest lists Smith’s great-grandparents and contains her own first name in handwriting. It is a physical trace of a journey that can no longer be experienced firsthand. The document symbolizes the distance between present and past, and the grief of knowing only fragments.

4. In what way does the novel present grief as both destructive and generative?
   The brush fire destroys the field, yet the fire also clears ground for new growth. Similarly, the loss of Mary’s memories led Smith to write a book that keeps her grandmother’s spirit alive. Grief takes away but also compels creation.

5. Why does Smith say she felt “called to write” this story?
   She saw her first name on the RMS Olympic manifest, which felt like a sign. Additionally, the story became so strong that it felt like her ancestors were whispering. This sense of calling transforms grief into a mission to preserve family history, even in altered form.