Sunshine State began with a personal account and it ends (well, almost ends) with another personal account. “Rabbit” tells the story of Gerard’s grandparents; there’s no embellishing, nothing fictional, just her own barebones experiences. Where the first essay seemed to be confessional, I’m not sure what this essay is trying to be. It’s not a story about grieving or moving on, it’s sort of a story about family, it also doesn’t seem to be a story about aging or death. We’ve discussed the idea, in fictional stories, that perhaps the title doesn’t necessarily have to have any resonance, metaphorically at least. I began to wonder if maybe Gerard’s essays function in the same ways — is she just writing them for the sake of writing? Do they have to mean anything? She leaves us with a moment of sentimentality when she falls asleep on her father’s lap, a moment of embarrassment when her grandfather’s pants are spotted with urine, and a moment of trauma when her grandfather’s colostomy stoma opens revealing his intestines. We experience the sadness of her grandfather’s death and this heartbreaking exchange:

“You said he was cute.”

“He was,” she said. “Then he went and died on me.”

Gerard describes the cruelty of old age, her grandfather’s cancer and her grandmother’s stroke, with graphic detail, but this isn’t, by any means, an investigative report. The ending seems to be a stretch as well — connecting the stuffed rabbit her grandmother gave her with the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. I understand the obvious connections, her grandmother gave her the rabbit, there are ideas of companionship and devotion in the book, but I just want her to tell me what she’s doing with these things.

I also won’t pretend to know what’s happening in the final story “Before: An Inventory.” The essay is written as an inventory — a complete list of something: goods, property, the contents of a building. But is that it? She mentions cats and dogs several times, one mention of the seabird sanctuary, several mentions of slugs and plants and nature. There are so many different kinds of animals, from the bizarre “beetles mating on the neck-high corn” and “alien mouths of barnacles” to the mundane milk cows and house cats. There’s something hypnotic about the strange lists of random and sporadic objects and images. It also seems that she begins with her 30th birthday and moves back in time to memories of her childhood. The form itself is intentional and perhaps it’s meant to encapsulate everything that inspired this collection of essays.