Grief and Caregiving in Life, and Death, and Giants

The Claim

In Life, and Death, and Giants, grief is not an emotion that arrives after death. It is the work of staying close to someone who is dying—and, after death, the work of staying close to the people who remain. The novel's claim is that caregiving does not rescue mourners from grief; it gives grief a practical, repeatable form. Tending a body, describing a sunrise, sitting through the night, folding a dead man's clothes: these acts make loss bearable without pretending it is fair.

At the same time, the novel refuses to romanticize caregiving. It shows helplessness, avoidance, exhaustion, and the failure of care to save anyone. Grief is not solved; it is shared. The story repeatedly returns to the bedside of the dying, first Rachel Fisher and later her grandson Gabriel Fisher, and it asks what we owe one another when death is neither fair nor preventable.

The epigraph's Emily Dickinson poem frames "Life, and Death, and Giants" as "Minor—Apparatus—Hopper of the Mill—" or a "Beetle at the Candle—," small components in an indifferent machinery. Against that backdrop, the novel's caregivers do not try to defeat death; they try to stay near it. Emily Dickinson's poetry becomes an emblem of private grief and the language needed to bear it.

A Birth That Is Also a Funeral

The novel begins with a birth that is also a death. Thomas Kennedy, a veterinarian hiding from his own past, is summoned to help Rachel Fisher, a young Amish woman in prolonged labor who refuses medical help. Thomas protests, but he uses livestock surgical techniques to deliver a massive baby boy, Gabriel, who weighs eighteen pounds. Rachel dies shortly afterward.

This origin scene fuses grief and caregiving into a single event. Thomas cannot save Rachel, but he can deliver her son. His care is unorthodox, desperate, and ultimately insufficient—yet it gives Gabriel his life. In the same chapter, the reader learns that Jasper Fisher brings his dying mother to a stranger, that Thomas has fled Milwaukee after his wife's suicide, and that the town of Lakota, Wisconsin, will never be anonymous again. Grief is present from the first page, and it never leaves.

Thomas's own history deepens this theme. With his wife Angela, he endured five miscarriages and the stillbirth of a son named Samuel; Angela's grief fractured their marriage, and her later suicide drove Thomas out of Milwaukee. A caregiver who has saved countless animals, Thomas could not save his own family. His presence in the novel, then, is shaped by the knowledge that caregiving can fail. He keeps caring anyway.

Vigils Around Gabriel

The novel's fullest picture of grief and caregiving appears in Gabriel's final months. Diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in London, the not-yet-twenty-three-year-old athlete comes home blind. Thomas makes the call to Trey Beathard, who describes the news as a knot of snakes in his guts. Hannah Fisher moves into Thomas's house, and the family builds a rhythm around Gabriel's dying body.

Hannah's chapter of the vigil is full of small, repeated acts. She opens the shades every morning to let the sun cross Gabriel's body. She opens windows for birdsong. When Gabriel grows too weak to walk, she helps him with his leg and kneels to tie his shoes. She describes the world for him because he can no longer see it. Their daily walks shrink to the patio, where they listen to birds and feel the warmth of the sun. She tells herself to treasure every minute, even as she realizes how often we squander ordinary time.

Trey's vigil shows another side of care: the caregivers' own helplessness. He cannot eat or sleep after learning about Gabriel. He visits, stops visiting because he cannot bear it, then returns after Thomas tells him Gabriel is asking for him. He volunteers to take an overnight shift each week, Sunday nights into Monday mornings. During a 3 a.m. pain episode, he holds Gabriel's arm, gives him water, and stays close. He tells Gabriel to call Bella—the girl he loved and left—but Gabriel says he cannot. Trey can be present, but he cannot make the call for him. Caregiving has real limits, and the novel lets those limits hurt.

Gabriel's death scene brings the natural world into the vigil. Fireflies gather by the tens of thousands, swirl around his bed, and rise as he dies. Thomas walks the yard collecting feathers: pheasant, turkey, swan, cardinal, crane, owl, goldfinch, and more. He gives feathers to the mourners and lays the most beautiful ones across Gabriel's chest. The fireflies and feathers turn a private bedside into something sacred. They also give the living a way to participate in death without needing to fix it.

The Funeral as Communal Caregiving

After Gabriel's death, the community gathers for an Amish funeral in a hidden field, with a painted sign directing strangers elsewhere. Billy Walton hears the news and proposes to Stella in his pajamas before the service; she accepts. At the funeral, Amish and English sit together on backless benches. They sing German hymns and then "Take My Hand and Lead Me." Charlie reads "To an Athlete Dying Young." Coach Beathard speaks about Gabriel's joy. Thomas breaks down and thanks the community for welcoming him. Billy, unable to get through his grief, tells a coffin joke: he wants people to say "Look! He's moving!" Even a few Amish smile. Oliver Edwards, the turkey farmer, stands and sings "Amazing Grace," and the mourners file past the body.

This scene makes the theme explicit: grief becomes bearable when it is held by other people. The joke is not an escape from grief; it is a form of care for the living. The eulogies are not performances; they are communal acts of attention. Gabriel is buried beside his mother Rachel and opposite his brother Jasper, a physical arrangement that tells his family's story of loss. Caregiving here extends beyond the bedside and into the work of mourning together.

What Caregiving Cannot Fix

The novel's complexity lies in its refusal to make caregiving redemptive. Thomas's care did not save Angela or their marriage. Hannah's faith did not prevent the deaths of her infant son, her grown daughter, and two grandsons. Trey's vigil does not heal Gabriel. Gabriel himself cannot undo the breakup with Bella, and the unfinished phone call becomes part of the story's sorrow. Hannah and Thomas share an unfinished goodbye; she says, "In another time…" and cannot finish. He cries into her hair, and she presses her face into his chest. Love remains incomplete because death interrupts it.

After the funeral, the family handles Gabriel's few physical things. They dismantle his oversized bed, ship his prosthetic legs to a hospital, and fold his enormous clothes. They refuse an alderman's offer to buy Gabriel's shoes for a tourist display. These acts show care for memory rather than spectacle. Hannah returns to Josiah and their great-grandson Raphael, and the novel closes with the three catching fireflies—a ritual of gentle light and continuity. Thomas, still mourning Hannah and Gabriel, sells his house to Bella, scatters his mother's ashes, and drives west toward a cabin on the Missouri River. Grief does not disappear; it becomes the next chapter.

The Symbolic Language of Grief

Three symbols carry the theme across the novel. Emily Dickinson's poetry, first found by Hannah hidden in her mother's belongings, becomes a secret vocabulary for loss and doubt. Thomas keeps a copy of Dickinson's poems that Hannah left him, connecting two people who cannot fully name their friendship. The fireflies appear at Gabriel's death and again in the final catching scene with the children, linking the mystery of death to the continuity of family. The feathers Thomas gathers give mourners something weightless to hold, a physical token of the spirit that has left the body. Together, these symbols suggest that caregiving is not only practical; it is also the work of making meaning after death.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the novel tie caregiving to grief in the prologue?
   Thomas Kennedy delivers Rachel's baby even though he cannot save Rachel. The birth and death in the same room show that caregiving is not about success; it is about staying with a person in need. The grief of that loss shapes Gabriel's entire life and the town's myth around him.

2. What specific routines show Hannah caring for Gabriel, and what do they reveal?
   Hannah raises the shades, opens windows, ties his shoes, describes what she sees, and takes him on walks. These small acts reveal that grief is expressed through attention. Caregiving becomes a daily practice of love when the illness cannot be cured.

3. How does Trey Beathard's response to bedside duty complicate the theme?
   Trey feels helpless, stops visiting because he cannot stand it, and later returns to take overnight shifts. His struggle shows that caregivers need support themselves and that love often involves coming back after running away. The novel refuses to make caregiving clean or effortless.

4. What role do the fireflies and feathers play in Gabriel's death scene?
   The fireflies gather around his bed and rise with his soul, and Thomas collects feathers to give to each mourner and to lay on Gabriel's chest. These images turn the bedside into a communal witness and give the living physical objects for their grief.

5. How does the funeral scene show grief as communal rather than private?
   Amish and English neighbors gather in a hidden field, sing, speak, cry, and even laugh together. Billy's coffin joke, Charlie's poem, Oliver's singing, and the burial beside Rachel and Jasper are all ways the community shares the weight of loss. Individual grief becomes public care.