40 pages • 1-hour read
And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer
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Pages 67-77Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide depicts illness, mental illness, and death.
Pages 67-71 Summary
Noah and Ted walk through the hospital. Ted tells Noah not to feel ashamed, and Noah asks whether Grandpa is in pain, clarifying that he means inside his head rather than from the cut. Ted says that “it’s hard to explain” (68). Noah tells his dad not to be scared and says he will help keep the bears away because he wet himself in the ambulance, which makes Ted laugh.
Ted explains that they need to be careful with Grandpa’s brain because it is working more slowly than before. Noah says that he has noticed this, observing that it is taking Grandpa longer to get “home”—“‘The way home’s getting longer and longer every morning now’” (70).
Crying, Ted stops and hugs Noah, telling him how smart he is and how much he loves him. When Noah asks how they can help, Ted says they can help by keeping Grandpa company. They go outside to the parking lot, where there is a green tent.
Pages 71-72 Summary
Ted and Grandpa argue in the hospital. Ted tries to get Grandpa to sit down, but Grandpa becomes angry, saying he has to work and cannot teach Ted to ride a bike. Grandpa asks for his cigarettes, and Ted tells him that he has not smoked for years. Ted explains that Grandpa quit after Ted was born, holding onto Grandpa’s shoulders. Grandpa recognizes Ted and comments on how much he has grown, saying, “You’ve gotten so big, Tedted” (71).
Ted tells Grandpa that Noah will stay with him while he goes to the car. Grandpa rests his head against Ted’s and says they need to go home, adding that “your mother’s waiting for us” (72). Ted agrees, saying they will go home soon. Grandpa asks how tall Ted is now and says they need to put more stones under the anchor. Just before Ted leaves the room, Grandpa asks about Ted’s guitar.
Pages 72-77 Summary
A person wakes up in a green tent inside a hospital room, frightened and crying while a young man beside him tells him not to be scared. A balloon floats above them. The person says he does not know who the young man is, and the young man explains that he is Noah and that the person is Grandpa. Noah reminds Grandpa of important memories, saying, “You taught me to cycle on the road outside your house and you loved my grandma so much that there wasn’t room for you in your own feet” (73). Noah gives Grandpa part of the balloon string and shows that he is holding the string as well.
Noah asks if Grandpa remembers sleeping in a tent by the lake and tying string around their wrists so that if Noah woke up scared, Grandpa would wake too. Remembering, Grandpa touches Noah’s cheek and asks about school, asking, “Are the teachers better now?” (75). Noah says they are and adds that he is now a teacher.
Grandpa closes his eyes, listening to space singing and to Ted playing his guitar. Noah sits beside his daughter, who is asleep. She prefers language and music to mathematics and is growing quickly. The three of them sleep together in the tent, unafraid and surrounded by the smell of hyacinths.
Pages 67-77 Analysis
The final section of And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer marks a shift from metaphorical exploration to lived reality. While the novella has relied heavily on imagined space to externalize Grandpa’s cognitive decline, pages 67-77 ground the narrative in the physical reality of the hospital. This movement does not abandon metaphor so much as transform it: the square, the boat, and space itself coalesce into the green tent pitched in the middle of a hospital room. Here, the theme of The Emotional Labor of Letting Go becomes the governing principle as they come to acceptance in a shared physical rather than metaphysical space.
This acceptance is articulated most clearly in the statement, “We can walk down the road with him. We can keep him company” (70). The metaphor of walking paints cognitive decline as a shared journey rather than an isolated descent. Importantly, the sentence offers no promise of direction or recovery. Instead, it emphasizes their togetherness, presenting acceptance as an ongoing commitment, no matter the circumstances.
Naming and repetition play a critical role in sustaining identity as Grandpa’s memory deteriorates further. The return of affectionate naming— “Tedted”—echoes Grandpa’s earlier use of “Noahnoah,” conflating Ted and Noah as children in Grandpa’s memory. It reveals the sentimentality Grandpa cannot show to the adult Ted, with whom he is bound in conflict. In this way, Memory Loss as the Erasure of Identity actually gives Grandpa an opening to express love and affection for the childhood version of Ted even if can’t do the same for Ted as an adult.
The emotional and narrative culmination of the text arrives in Noah’s speech to Grandpa, delivered while Grandpa can no longer reliably identify who Noah is. Rather than prompting Grandpa to remember, Noah assumes the responsibility of remembering for him. The speech uses humor to reconstruct Grandpa’s identity through specific references that only Grandpa would understand:
I’m Noah. You’re my grandpa. You taught me to cycle on the road outside your house and you loved my grandma so much that there wasn’t room for you in your own feet. She hated coriander but put up with you. You swore you would never stop smoking but you did when you became a father. You’ve been to space, because you’re a born adventurer, and once you went to your doctor and said, ‘Doctor, doctor! I’ve broken my arm in two places!’ and then the doctor told you that you should really stop going there (73).
This speech represents the fullest expression of Love as an Anchor Against Cognitive Decline. Noah does not frame Grandpa’s life in terms of achievements or even chronology; instead, he selects moments defined by love, imagery, and emotional meaning. By listing habits, jokes, and small sacrifices, Noah reconstructs Grandpa’s identity as expansive rather than fixed, shaped by how he related to others.
The green tent serves as the final resolution of the imagined space Grandpa and Noah inhabited in earlier sections. By being a shared, intimate space that recalls the times Noah and Grandpa spent together, the tent creates proximity and reassurance. It does not protect Grandpa from death or decline; with Noah there, it protects him from being alone.
In these final pages, memory loss reaches its most advanced stage, yet the narrative refuses despair. Grandpa’s identity may no longer be self-sustaining, but it remains intact through the care of those around him. Noah, Ted, and even Grandma participate in holding Grandpa in place when he can no longer hold it himself. The novella concludes not by solving the problem of memory loss, but by demonstrating how love endures within it.
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