What Happens In Karinas Last Days Story Ending?

I finished reading ‘Karina’s Last Days’ last night and it’s still buzzing around in my head. It wasn’t what I expected for an ending – it’s quiet and sad. The last day of Karina’s life is spent watching the garden go through the seasons of another afternoon. She remembers a meaningless row with her sister all those years before and wonders why she’d never apologized. She tries to write a note but her hands aren’t cooperating.

Her passing is almost afterthought as the narrator of Chapter 17 so plainly states. The real emotional impact of her dying is expressed in the next chapter which is written from the perspective of her daughter as she finds the note that her mother tried to write before she died. The note only contained the one word ‘sorry’ but in writing those words Karina’s relationship with her daughter is completely re-framed and we are shown the two women’s imperfect relationship with all its unanswered questions and unfinished business – the dying of Karina is less significant than the dying of their relationship as it had been lived with all its imperfections.

What stays with me is the same thing: that Karina and her family never do reach a point of closure, and that the reader is left with the same feelings of longing and imperfection that Karina had with her loved ones while she was still alive. The finality of her death is mirrored by the lack of closure for the reader in the following chapter.

The end of the book is another clever aspect of it as it supports the central idea of dying alone. The dying Karina is surrounded by memories rather than people and we watch her go through the processes of losing the world as she loses herself. We pull away from her thoughts and are able to experience the sensation of her losing consciousness by feeling the softness of the blanket, the weight of the pen in her hand and the color of the sky outside her window.

What is powerful about this conclusion is the aftermath of Karina’s death as experienced by her daughter, Elara. The daughter believes that Karina’s careless scrawl of a pen is an attempt at a grand apology, yet we, the readers, had insight into Karina’s growing frustration with her ailing body, her recalled memory of an everyday sort. There is a tragic chasm between Elara’s perception of forgiveness and Karina’s incomplete intention. What Elara believes to be true about her mother is in reality a fiction that the daughter has created in order to give meaning to her mother’s life. It’s a brutally honest and unsentimental conclusion to Karina’s dying process.

This is not a happy or heroic ending. The main character dies alone and her greatest regret is a selfish dispute with another person. Extremely realistic. The note was devastating.

It was a fairly underwhelming end to the book for me. Everyone has been saying how profound it is and I was expecting something more after that slow building. But instead we are just left with the impression of Karina’s death as she drifts off into the garden descriptions. It is all implication and silence and it is so dull and lonely and I felt so detached from it all. In contrast the daughter’s scene was so much better but by then it didn’t matter because Karina was already dead. It was a brave choice but it didn’t have the same emotional impact on me that I sense it has had on others.