A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Eggers revisits Lake Forest for a friend’s wedding. He’s not thrilled about attending a wedding, and hopes it’ll be a traditional affair—at Beth’s wedding, which happened recently, almost nothing was conventional, and Eggers felt embarrassed by the entire thing (Beth walked down the aisle to a KISS song). With Toph staying in LA with Bill, Eggers will remain in Illinois for a few extra days to excavate his past. He plans to visit the funeral home that at one point held his parents before they were cremated. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to track down their remains, though he does have a slight hope that something like this might happen. He also plans to revisit his childhood home and talk to people he hasn’t seen for years. “This trip is about the fact that things have been much too calm in San Francisco,” he writes.

Staying with two high school friends who are now roommates, Eggers sets out on his first day with a list, upon which he has written the places and people he wants to visit: the funeral home, his old house, his father’s friend, Sarah, and several others. “The idea, I suppose, is the emotional equivalent of a drug binge,” he admits, “the tossing together of as much disparate and presumably incompatible stimuli as possible, in a short span, five days, together constituting a sort of socio-familial archaeological bender, to see what comes of it, how much can be dredged up, brought back, remembered, exploited, excused, pitied, made known, made permanent.” He wonders if he should spend the majority of his time drunk out of his mind, thinking that this might add something valuable to the experience, though he realizes it would also make it hard for him to drive.

Outside his childhood home, Eggers writes a note and puts it in the mailbox. The note explains that he used to live here and that he’d love to come inside. If, he writes, the current residents are amenable to this idea, they should feel free to call him. To his surprise, seeing his house makes him feel absolutely nothing. Afterwards, he finds a pay phone and calls Sarah, asking her if she’d like to have lunch or coffee in the coming days. “She says any night is fine,” he writes.

At the wedding—which is, to his great relief, exceedingly normal—people ask Eggers about Toph and about Might, which he says probably won’t be going for much longer. “We’re all exhausted,” he notes, explaining that everyone is “tired of having other jobs” and will either need to get significant funding or else move the entire operation to New York. Most of the editors are thinking of moving anyway. As Eggers stands around talking to his friends, he watches older wedding guests dance and feels an acute dislike for them, since he thinks they have taken over “this wedding of two young people.”

The next day, Eggers returns to his childhood home, which the current residents have invited him to tour. Inside, he’s shocked to see that they’ve completely changed the house’s layout. They refer to what he thinks of as the family room as the living room, and they’ve even taken down the wallpaper in his room, which he picked out with his mother. As he walks from room to room, he finds himself asking pointed technical questions, like, “Is this new molding? Is this drywall?” Before entering the house, he had felt as if the family made a mistake letting him in, since he sees his interest as no more than a morbid curiosity. As he surveys the house, though, he merely feels like “a friendly neighbor with an interest in decorating.”

Eggers goes to Lake Michigan despite the cold and uses the payphone to call Beth. “You know about those ashes?” he says, asking if the cremation service ever called her. “Yeah they did,” she says, revealing that they called a year ago saying they had their parents’ ashes. When Eggers asks how she responded, she tells him she said they didn’t want the remains. “What do we want with some stupid ashes?” she adds. Eggers can’t believe she would do this without consulting him or Bill, and this makes Beth so angry that she hangs up. “This is just too—I had loved how vague it was before,” Eggers writes. “But now, knowing that Beth knew, and that they’re really gone, discarded, that we had a chance—” He never finishes this sentence. “Oh,” he writes, “we are monsters.”

Eggers calls his father’s friend and speaks to his wife, who tells him that her husband is in the hospital with an infection. However, she insists that it’s not serious and urges Eggers to go visit him. As such, Eggers makes its way to the same hospital his mother stayed in periodically throughout her final months. When he arrives, he’s shocked to see that his father’s friend is in much worse shape than his wife indicated, but he still asks the man questions about his father.

This conversation throws Eggers into the memory of his father’s hospitalization. Apparently, it was quite unexpected, since he’d just recently been diagnosed. Nonetheless, the doctors told Eggers’s mother that his situation was worse than expected and that he could die at any time. She then rushed to visit him and found him smoking in his room. “He’s not going to go today,” she said, driving home and adding that it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. An hour later, though, he was dead. Now, his friend lies in the hospital and tells Eggers how good his father was at driving. Eggers asks him if he thinks his father “felt alone when he died.” Unfortunately, the phone rings, and when his father’s friend finishes the call, he pretends to have forgotten the question.

The following day, Eggers visits the funeral home and asks the young man working there if he has any paperwork documenting where his parents’ bodies were sent. When the employee produces a file, Eggers asks if he can have a copy of it, so the man goes downstairs to the photocopier. Coming back upstairs, he gives Eggers a cardboard box marked Heidi Eggers. “You mean this is…” Eggers says, and the employee confirms that the box holds his mother’s remains. Not knowing what to do, Eggers leaves and puts the box on the passenger’s seat, knowing that his mother would be furious if he put her in the trunk. “The box is my mother, only smaller,” he writes. “The box is not my mother. Is the box my mother? No.” He then imagines her face on the box and feels like a “monster” for “looking for bad things.”

At his friends’ apartment that night, Eggers receives a call from Meredith, who tells him that John is “threatening” suicide again. Distracted by the fact that his mother’s remains are sitting outside in the car, Eggers calls John and says, “What’s the problem?” After listening to John complain about being a burden, Eggers changes the subject by telling John about finding his mother’s ashes. He also talks about how he “spent the night driving around the frozen, broken South Side of Chicago” after visiting the funeral home. He was, he tells John, “looking for something to happen” as he drove around speaking into a tape recorder. He says that he imagined a “black man in an army jacket” breaking his car window and forcing him to drive at gunpoint until they reached Lake Michigan, where the man would shoot him.

John loves hearing Eggers talk about his morbid fears. Eggers continues, saying, “The thing I was most worried about when I was down there, in the South Side, driving around and talking into the tape recorder? I was worried that after I was shot near the lake, that the murderer, who really only wanted the car, would for some reason find and play the tape, the one where I’m describing my imagining someone like him killing me, and all this stuff about finding the box, and that this murderer would think I’m this racist weirdo.” Enthralled, John has completely forgotten about his own problems. “By now he’s more worried about me than himself,” Eggers reflects. Before hanging up, he tells John he’s planning on seeing Sarah the next day. “Oh man,” John says. “You have to tell me how it goes.”

Eggers and Sarah enjoy an evening of drinking and talking about what it was like to grow up in Lake Forest. At one point, they go out to a bar, but they feel uncomfortable seeing people they both know, so they leave and go back to her apartment, where they start kissing on her couch. As things progress, Eggers finds himself “unsettled” by the fact that Sarah’s eyes are open. “She knows I have my mother’s box in the rental car,” he thinks, wondering if she can sense it.

Eggers’s thoughts about his mother lead to a whirlwind of worries, including that Sarah can sense that he heard Sari Locker on the radio earlier that day. He also wonders if she knows—somehow—that he visited the medical school where his parents’ bodies were examined, and that when he finally found the doctor’s name who studied them, he opened the door, saw him sitting there, said “Oop, sorry!” and turned around. Despite these distractions, he and Sarah make their way into the bedroom. The next morning, Eggers feels wonderful in her bed. He even sleeps late as she moves around the apartment, but then it becomes clear she wants him to wake up. He suggests they go out to breakfast, but she makes up an excuse and then, suddenly, he’s putting on his shoes and she’s saying “Happy New Year!” and sending him out the door.

The next day, which is New Year’s Day, Eggers goes to Lake Michigan. He’s returning to California that evening, but before he leaves he plans to spread his mother’s ashes. He opens the box and finds a small golden container—like a cookie tin—inside. When he opens that, he’s surprised to see that the ashes look more like multi-colored pebbles than he expected, and he wonders what each color is. For instance, are the white pieces bone? Scared of accidentally inhaling the remains, he walks over to the water and imagines his mother watching him, suddenly feeling “stupid.” This gesture, he realizes, is “ridiculous, small, [and] tacky.” He decides that he should spread his mother’s ashes in the actual ocean, thinking that maybe he should travel to Cape Cod, though this would require asking Bill to keep Toph longer, and then he’d have to tell the family what he’s doing.

Deciding that spreading his mother’s ashes in Cape Cod is unrealistic, Eggers realizes that today is also his mother’s birthday. This, he thinks, is a sign that he’s doing the right thing by releasing her into Lake Michigan, a place she loved. He takes a handful of ashes and scatters them, surprised at how light they are. He hates that they keep falling on the ground, so he kicks at them, though he then feels uncomfortable about kicking his mother’s ashes. “Oh this is so plain, disgraceful, pathetic,” he thinks. “Or beautiful and loving and glorious! Yes, beautiful and loving and glorious!” He finally decides that this is a good act, something she’d love.