Walk Two Moons is largely the story of how 13-year-old Sal deals with grief—first after Momma leaves Sal and Dad without warning, and then when Momma dies in a bus accident on her trip to Lewiston, Idaho. Sal’s healing process from this trauma takes almost two years: she transforms from being unable to identify her own emotions, to being unwilling to accept that Momma is actually dead, to finally being able to accept that Momma is gone and wasn’t trying to hurt Sal by leaving. And by showing several different characters cope with their grief in different ways alongside Sal, Walk Two Moons makes it clear that recovering from the loss of a loved one isn’t always easy, fast, or straightforward. It can take a long time to heal, and healing can take different forms, some of which may seem strange to other people—like making up fantastical stories to explain a person’s absence, or outright refusing to acknowledge that they’re gone. The novel thus suggests that every person grieves differently, and that there isn’t one right way to do so—but that in order to find closure and heal, a person must eventually accept that their loved one is gone.
One of the most unsettling parts of the grieving process, the novel suggests, is that two people can grieve for someone in totally different ways. Sal runs up against this in the weeks after Momma leaves and dies. At first, she and Dad seem to respond in similar ways: they both wander around the house and farm, unable to function without Momma. But things get far more difficult for Sal when Dad insists that the two of them leave the farm and move to Euclid, Ohio. Especially since Dad chooses Euclid because of his friendship with a woman named Margaret Cadaver who lives there, Sal believes that Dad isn’t properly honoring Momma. It seems, to Sal, like Dad is moving on and moving away from the place Sal associates with Momma, without taking Sal’s feelings into account. A similar dynamic plays out in Sal’s friend, Phoebe Winterbottom’s, family when Phoebe’s mother disappears. Though Mrs. Winterbottom isn’t dead, Sal observes that some of Phoebe’s grief over her mother’s disappearance is heightened by the fact that neither Mr. Winterbottom nor her older sister, Prudence, seem to care all that much. While Phoebe throws herself into proving that Mrs. Winterbottom was kidnapped and murdered, Prudence focuses on her cheerleading tryouts; and Mr. Winterbottom, in Phoebe’s opinion, barely seems to care that his wife is gone. There are clues that Mr. Winterbottom does care about his wife and is worried about her—Phoebe and Sal catch him crying on several occasions—but because he doesn’t immediately agree to call the police when Phoebe asks him to, she believes he’s betraying her.
The novel also shows that people don’t always grieve in ways that make sense to other people. For much of the novel, readers are led to believe that Momma is only convalescing in Idaho—and this is because Sal, the book’s narrator, is unwilling to believe her mother is dead until she sees the wrecked bus and Momma’s grave firsthand. For Sal, refusing to believe her mother is dead is an act of self-preservation, one that allows her to avoid processing her crushing grief over losing her mother at such a young age. Sal recognizes that Phoebe’s insistence that Mrs. Winterbottom was kidnapped and murdered is a similar act of self-preservation. It’s inconceivable to Phoebe that Mrs. Winterbottom just left her; in order for Mrs. Winterbottom’s absence to make any sense in Phoebe’s mind, she has to believe that Mrs. Winterbottom was forced to leave her home and her family. And as was the case with Sal, this means that Phoebe doesn’t have to confront her grief. Indeed, Phoebe has little time to dwell on her emotions because she’s so busy gathering evidence, going to the police, and otherwise trying to figure out what happened to her mother.
Ultimately, though, Walk Two Moons suggests that these nonsensical grief practices must eventually give way to accepting the truth and confronting one’s emotions. Phoebe never has to fully complete this process, as her mother returns alive and well after a week or so away. But it’s disconcerting for Phoebe when, starting a few days before Mrs. Winterbottom returns, she discovers that all her hunches are incorrect. Her “creepy” neighbor Mrs. Cadaver didn’t murder her husband or Mrs. Winterbottom, and the lunatic Phoebe suspected of kidnapping Mrs. Winterbottom is actually Mrs. Winterbottom’s son whom she gave up for adoption before meeting Mr. Winterbottom. Faced with nothing to distract her from her grief, Phoebe has to confront that her mother chose to leave and must sit with this uncomfortable fact. Sal, however, finally finds closure when, in Lewiston, she’s able to visit the site of the bus accident and Momma’s grave. Her journey west with her grandparents, she realizes, was intended to show Sal the truth of what happened to Momma and help her move past her unwillingness to believe that Momma is dead. And it works: as Sal sits next to Momma’s grave and hears birdsong (a sound she associates with her mother), she realizes that although Momma is gone, her spirit will always be with Sal. With this, Walk Two Moons shows that the grieving process is difficult for everyone and can take many different (and sometimes confusing) forms. But the various acts of kindness throughout the novel—such as Gram and Gramps taking Sal on the road trip and Sal supporting Phoebe in her desperate hunt for the lunatic—suggest that compassion is one of the best ways to help a grieving person, no matter what their grief looks like.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Grief ThemeTracker
Grief Quotes in Walk Two Moons
One day, about two weeks after she had left, I was standing against the fence watching a newborn calf wobble on its thin legs. It tripped and wobbled and swung its big head in my direction and gave me a sweet, loving look. “Oh!” I thought. “I am happy at this moment in time.” I was surprised that I knew this all by myself, without my mother there. And that night in bed, I did not cry. I said to myself, “Salamanca Tree Hiddle, you can be happy without her.” It seemed a mean thought and I was sorry for it, but it felt true.
Ben touched Phoebe’s arm. She flinched. “Ha,” he said. “Gotcha. You’re jumpy, too, Free Bee.”
And that, too, bothered me. I had already noticed how tense Phoebe’s whole family seemed, how tidy, how respectable, how thumpingly stiff. Was I becoming like that? Why were they like that? A couple times I had seen Phoebe’s mother try to touch Phoebe or Prudence or Mr. Winterbottom, but they all drew back from her. It was as if they had outgrown her.
Had I been drawing away from my own mother? Did she have empty spaces left over? Was that why she left?
The morning after my father learned that my mother was not coming back, he left for Lewiston, Idaho. Gram and Gramps came to stay with me. I had pleaded to go along, but my father said he didn’t think I should have to go through that. That day I climbed up into the maple and watched the singing tree, waiting for it to sing. I stayed there all day and on into the early evening. It did not sing.
At dusk, Gramps placed three sleeping bags at the foot of the tree, and he, Gram, and I slept there all night. The tree did not sing.
What I started doing was remembering the day before my mother left. I did not know it was to be her last day home. Several times that day, my mother asked me if I wanted to walk up in the fields with her. It was drizzling outside, and I was cleaning my desk, and I just did not feel like going. “Maybe later,” I kept saying. When she asked me for about the tenth time, I said, “No! I don’t want to go. Why do you keep asking me?” I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t mean anything by it, but that was one of the last memories she had of me, and I wished I could take it back.
“But for now,” he said, “we have to leave because your mother is haunting me day and night. She’s in the fields, the air, the barn, the walls, the trees.”
On that long day that my father and I left the farm behind and drove to Euclid, I wished that my father was not such a good man, so there would be someone to blame for my mother’s leaving. I didn’t want to blame her. She was my mother, and she was part of me.
In my mini journal, I confessed that I had since kissed all different kinds of trees, and each family of trees—oaks, maples, elms, birches—had a special flavor all its own. Mixed which each tree’s taste was the slight taste of blackberries, and why this was so, I could not explain.
And just like Phoebe, who had waved her mother’s sweater in front of her father, I had brought a chicken in from the coop: Would Mom leave her favorite chicken?” I demanded. “She loves this chicken.”
What I really meant was, “How can she not come back to me? She loves me.”
“So you didn’t leave Gramps just because of the cussing?”
“Salamanca, I don’t even remember why I did that. Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.”
It went on and on like that. I hated her that day. I didn’t care how upset she was about her mother, I really hated her, and I wanted her to leave. I wondered if this was how my father felt when I threw all those temper tantrums. Maybe he hated me for a while.
I knew Phoebe was convinced that her mother was kidnapped because it was impossible for Phoebe to imagine that her mother could leave for any other reason. I wanted to call Phoebe and say that maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it.
When I told this part to Gram and Gramps, Gramps said, “You mean it had nothing to do with Peeby?” They looked at each other. They didn’t say anything, but there was something in that look that suggested I had just said something important. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe my mother’s leaving had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was separate and apart. We couldn’t own our mothers.
Instead, I lay there thinking of the poem about the traveler, and I could see the tide rising and falling, and those horrid white hands snatching the traveler. How could it be normal, that traveler dying? And how could such a thing be normal and terrible both at the same time?
I started wondering if the birds of sadness had built their next in Mrs. Cadaver’s hair afterward, and if so, how she got rid of them. Her husband dying and her mother being blinded were events that would matter in the course of a lifetime. I saw everyone else going on with their own agendas while Mrs. Cadaver was frantically trying to keep her husband and her mother alive. Did she regret anything? Did she know the worth of water before the well was dry?
If there had been a vase, would have squashed it, because our heads moved completely together and our lips landed in the right place, which was on the other person’s lips. It was a real kiss, and it did not taste like chicken.
And then our heads moved slowly backward and we stared out across the lawn, and I felt like the newlY born horse who knows nothing but feels everything.
Ben touched his lips. “Did it taste a little like blackberries to you?” He said.
“It’s not terrible,” my mother said. “It’s normal. She’s weaning them from her.”
“Does she have to do that? Why can’t they stay with her?”
“It isn’t good for her or for them. They have to become independent. What if something happened to Moody Blue? They wouldn’t know how to survive without her.”
While I prayed for Gram outside the hospital, I wondered if my mother’s trip to Idaho was like Moody Blue’s behavior. Maybe part of it was for my mother and part of it was for me.
In the midst of the still morning, with only the sound of the river gurgling by, I heard a bird. It was singing a birdsong, a true, sweet birdsong. I looked all around and then up into the willow that leaned toward the river. The birdsong came from the top of the willow and I did not want to look too closely, because I wanted it to be the tree that was singing.
