The Gathering

In these chapters, the physical body emerges as a predominant symbol for mortality, developing The Impact of Death and Grief. Grappling with Liam’s death makes Veronica hyper-aware of her own body and the bodies of others: “I can’t win, as I pass old men and old women, with their eczemous creases, or lean over the railing, pulling in the sea air to keep the rising vomit down, while thinking of my brother’s own flesh and how it will look in two months” (76). In this passage, the fallibility of the body is on full display: It ages, breaks down, and deteriorates, even after death. The aging bodies around Veronica remind her of her brother, who is not liberated from his body at death but bound to it by the physical process of decay. The novel uses corporeality to contemplate life, death, and grief.

One way in which Veronica tries to cope with her grief is by revisiting the past. This introduces the theme of The Complexity of Memory. She mines her memories of childhood and university for evidence of why Liam ultimately took his own life. However, Veronica’s memories are problematic; she herself admits that she can’t trust her memories because time and experience have inflected them with meanings that weren’t accessible to her at the time. Complicating matters, she experiences certain memories as truth even when she knows they can’t be. In this way, memory may be understood as a metaphor for storytelling. Memories and narratives are both ways to fill in the gaps left by history, both personal and communal. Memories are narratives that conflate the real and imagined, the past and the present. Because Veronica is convinced that the origins of Liam’s problems began in the past, she projects her contemporary desire for logic onto Hegarty family history. Veronica’s struggle to come to terms with Liam’s death is also a struggle to come to terms with the past, and what she can or can’t know.

Ironically, one important “memory” that Veronica revisits is of something that happened before she was born: her grandparents’ meeting and marriage. Veronica wants so desperately for the past to hold an explanation for what happened to Liam that she imagines a narrative about the Hegarty family origins that she couldn’t possibly know to be true. She frames Ada and Charlie’s marriage as a union that should have never been, but that is how she wants to see it. As the narrator of The Gathering, Veronica has the power to revise her family history in the hopes that she can explain away her grief, resentments, and pain.

Abandonment is a prevalent motif in Veronica’s memories. Liam’s death is a form of abandonment that reminds Veronica of being sent to live with Ada as a child. Veronica’s separation from her mother felt like a rejection that is then replicated by Liam’s death by suicide. Other forms of abandonment or rejection include Tom’s apathy, and the lack of help and support Veronica receives from her other siblings in the aftermath of Liam’s death. Veronica sees these abandonments as evidence that she cannot rely or lean on her family. Thus, family becomes a burden to her.