In the final poems of the novel, Moth’s story reaches its climax with the revelation of her death and her life as a ghost. Throughout Moth’s time in New Mexico with Sani and his father, the past and the present begin to eerily converge, ultimately revealing the link between the young people and their forebears. 

Sani’s father’s revelations about his and Moth’s grandfather’s friendship underscore the novel’s theme of Cultural Inheritance as a Form of Self-Recognition. Moth and Sani have begun to discover their true identities by sharing stories of their ancestry, while Sani’s father’s link to Moth’s grandfather creates a direct bridge to the history of ancient Hoodoo and Diné customs. When enslaved African people first developed Hoodoo, or rootwork, during enslavement in the American South, they blended their traditional African “practices of ancestral reverence, plant medicine, and communication with the unseen […] with Indigenous herbalism and European folk magic” (“What Is Hoodoo? A Guide to the History of Rootwork.” Original Botanica, 14 Apr. 2025). The friendship between Sani’s father and Moth’s grandfather evidences this intersection of the traditions, resulting in a powerful magic that has brought Moth and Sani together so they might help each other better understand themselves and move beyond their current states of unrest.

The photo that Sani’s father shows Moth and Sani is a symbol of how the past might illuminate the individual’s identity and path in the present. On the back of the photo, Moth’s grandfather has written: “My friend, I know I ask too much, / but if your son can help her home / she’ll teach him how to live” (216). When the teenagers learn of this connection, they are forced to reexamine their relationship through the respective lenses of their ancestry. Sani is learning from the spirit world how to engage with life, instead of allowing his mental illness to dictate his fate. Moth is the spirit who ultimately guides Sani out of his psychological darkness and towards a transformative crossroads. 

Meanwhile, Moth’s grandfather (her forebear) has sent her a guide to lead her home to the spirit world, where she might find peace. “Go to the crossroads,” she remembers her grandfather saying in “Grandfather Left A Letter For Me,” “& walk north home” (217). With Sani by her side, she does ultimately travel back north to her former home in New York City and is able to let go of the physical world and rejoin her family in heaven.

Moth’s transformation at the end of the novel lends a natural resolution to the theme of The Enduring Nature of Grief. Throughout the novel, Moth has struggled to let go of her sorrow over losing her parents and brother. Her sadness is so great that she has refused to dance (formerly her greatest pleasure) as a sort of self-imposed atonement. Even when she does dance again by the fire with Sani, she is unable to reengage with life, reminding Sani that she can’t keep dancing because “I am guilty” (196). Moth’s sustained grief is a metaphor for generational trauma and ancestral sorrow. Moth indeed feels “weightless” and “breathless” (195) after her dance with Sani, yet her sorrow remains embedded within her joy. She convinces herself that her attempt at reclaiming happiness through dance is the reason Sani leaves her the next morning, “just like / everyone else” (201). 

This conviction reiterates the enduring nature of grief in the context of one’s ancestral woes. Moth carries her ancestors’ suffering inside of her, even when she is not aware of it. This is another reason she is reluctant to move on, even after her death. With Sani’s help and his father’s and her grandfather’s guidance, she ultimately finds a path to peace—implying that while grief might have no easy endpoint, she must accept spiritual rest as a way to honor her ancestral past.