All the Blues in the Sky

The motif of flying and piloting develops Sage’s changing relationship with control, uncertainty, and her own future. Becoming a pilot has been Sage’s dream since childhood; her mother recalls how even as a baby she became excited whenever she saw airplanes and helicopters and insists that Sage was “born to fly” (69). After Angel’s death, however, Sage initially resists attending the Fly Girl program that would teach her to be a pilot because pursuing an old dream requires imagining a future that Angel will not share. When she does begin the program, aviation offers the structure and knowledge Sage craves after a tragedy that was sudden and uncomfortable. At night, she even imagines herself piloting a plane above the clouds, thunder, and tears, dreaming of flying “[f]ar away to blue skies […] in control of the journey” and placing herself temporarily in control of her direction in life (123).

As Sage learns more about aviation, however, flying becomes less about escaping uncertainty and more about learning to function within it. She is disturbed to discover that even the science of flight contains questions without complete explanations, challenging her belief that technical knowledge will always provide the certainty that grief cannot. The lesson on turbulence develops this further, as Ms. Barabara When her instructor explains that turbulence is an uncomfortable but normal part of any flight, telling the class that “when I’m on a plane as a passenger and / we’re experiencing turbulence, I remind myself that airplanes / are made to handle turbulence and pilots are trained on what / to do” (128). Sage internalizes this idea, noting how emotional upheaval is also a navigable, survivable experience. She learns that just like pilots, she must “keep rising.” Her later dream of flying like Bessie Coleman and her desire to someday carry Angel’s name into the sky, imagining her friends and family calling, “Fly, Black girl. Fly. / Black girl, you are fly” (145), connects her childhood ambition with the person she is becoming after Angel’s death. Across the novel, the recurring language and experiences of flight develop from a desire for control and escape into a framework for accepting uncertainty, pursuing a future, and carrying grief forward rather than leaving it behind.

The mathematical concept of transversal and parallel lines, introduced by Mr. Dixon, symbolizes the way different experiences of loss can intersect. Sage initially struggles to connect with Ana and Zay in her grief group because their experiences of loss—slow and expected—seem fundamentally different from her own sudden, violent one. However, Mr. Dixon’s introduction of types of lines provides her with a new, logical framework: The girls are like parallel lines, each on their own distinct path, but a single event, the “transversal line” of death, has intersected all of them. As Sage explains it, “that one thing that touched us was the same thing / and wasn’t the same thing. / And it brought us together, made us relate to each other. / Similar, not the same. Connected forever” (166). With the help of these mathematical concepts to understand how loss touches people, Sage begins to appreciate and respect the variety of grief that can exist.

This realization allows Sage to grasp an important aspect of Finding Community After Loss. Earlier, Sage assumes that empathy requires another person’s experience to closely match her own; by this point, she recognizes that people can remain on distinct paths while sharing a meaningful point of connection. The symbol therefore gives Sage a logical framework for understanding what she has gradually learned through the grief group. Ultimately, acknowledging differences in suffering can bring people together and provide comfort—without erasing the extreme feelings that she feels about her own loss.