Love & Gelato

In these closing chapters, Lina completes her arc, emerging from the isolation and loneliness of her grief and loss to choose love and a new kind of family. She will never forget her mother, she knows, but she embraces Howard Mercer as the father she needs and all the family she wants. She rejects Thomas Heath and finds love with Ren. Ultimately, Lina embraces the gift her mother intended all along by sending her to Howard and by sharing, at last, her journal. In choosing romantic love with Ren and filial love with the good-hearted Howard, Lina finds her way after a year of darkness to a radiant hope. In the closing pages, she is now looking forward to what tomorrow might bring, symbolically suggested by the luminous Italian sunrises in the final chapters. Lina has found a way to survive her grief.

Lina also arrives at her own personal Definition of a Father. She comes to see the complexity of Howard’s character and, in the process, finds a father to love her, guide her, and be her friend. “Even though we tried our hand at a relationship,” Howard tells Lina, “your mother ended up choosing Matteo. But when she got sick, I was the one she asked to step in. And so I did. Because I loved her” (337). In their honest and painful conversation in Chapters 25 and 26, Lina has the first of what will be a succession of epiphanies that mark her transition into adulthood and, more importantly, her transition to doing what her mother failed to do: Choose love. Howard, in agreeing to go along with the lie that he was her father, hoped only to get a chance to help the daughter of the woman he never stopped loving. He says, “I thought if you believed I was your father, it would make you more likely to come here and give me a chance” (338). Here, Lina finally understands what a father is or, at least, should be. By contrast, Matteo’s connection to her stops at biology. Lina observes, “No one would ever come close to replacing [my mother], but if I had to choose someone, it would be Howard” (347). A loving father figure trumps a selfish and cruel biological father. In forming her own Definition of a Father, Lina transcends biology and embraces love.

Hadley’s posthumous vulnerability and honesty allows Lina to discover The Difference Between Love and Passion and make the best choice on behalf of herself and her mother. Howard, who understands the challenging Dynamic of Loss and Recovery, knows that for Lina to survive her grief over her mother’s death, she must continue to choose love. “What about this Ren business?” he asks (347). In finally rejecting Thomas and being honest with Ren about her feelings for him, she catalyzes her own rebirth—choosing not only love but also life. Lina is ready to be happy and look forward to tomorrow. A novel that begins with Lina at the graveyard, haunted by her mother’s death, closes in the defiant glow of early morning. She says, “I don’t get to stop missing [my mother]. Ever…But that [doesn’t] mean I [won’t] be okay” (330-31). This realization marks Lina’s triumphant embrace of hope and a new life. She says, “[M]aybe a day [will] come when the hole inside me [won’t] ache quite so badly […] that day is lightyears away, but right at this moment I [am] standing…in the middle of Tuscany and the sunrise [is] so beautiful it hurt[s]” (331).

Lina’s hope hinges on her ability to reboot her mother’s decision and, in the process, correct what she and her mother (and Howard, for that matter) see as Hadley’s wrong choice. Symbolic of Lina’s triumphant decision to embrace love rather than passion is The Dress she and Sonia pick out for the birthday party, an outward expression of her feelings for Ren. Like her mother picking out her own dress, Lina knows that choosing love means making oneself vulnerable to hurt. The fact that she’s still willing to put on The Dress and go find Ren, even though she’s experienced so much pain in the last year, signals Lina’s trajectory through her grief toward hope.

Love is not without its complications. Understanding from her mother’s journal the dangers of miscommunications and of things never said, Lina and Ren stumble at first to find their way to each other. Their conversation at the party falls apart, and they nearly break off their relationship. Later that night, however, under the Tuscan moon, Ren and Lina drop their pretenses, drop their obfuscations, and declare their love for each other. Unlike her mother, who fled Italy rather than face the complications of love, Lina agrees to stay. “So,” Ren asks grinning, “now that we won’t be chasing your mom’s ex-boyfriend around, what are we going to do?” (385). Lina says what her mother never got around to saying to Howard 17 years earlier: “Fall in love” (385). With that affirmation, Lina completes The Journey to Self-Discovery. From the girl who has always maintained a tight, protective grip on her heart, Lina emerges now as a young woman, sure of who she is and grounded by the love of a father she’s chosen and the unexpected gift of her mother: hope for tomorrow.