Under the Whispering Door

by T.J. Klune

If we worry about the little things all the time, we run the risk of missing the bigger things.”

Mei’s line here to Wallace is interesting to me. Is this the first time Wallace has heard something like this in his life? Doubtful. But I think this is the first time he actually hears what’s being said, even if he doesn’t show it. As someone who has felt like they’ve been backed into a corner, I know how easy it is to lash out, which is what Wallace does. Thankfully, Mei is having none of it and puts him in his place. She knows how important this work is, how fragile, but she also won’t let anyone walk (or talk!) all over her

Here was a shot of an island in a cerulean sea, the trees so thick, he couldn’t see the ground.

I wonder what this could be? While Hugo and Mei (and to a lesser extent: Apollo, Nelson, and Wallace) are able to perform “magic,” I don’t know if this story connected to a group of gremlins and their dads or not. Is it possible magic exists, and somewhere, Wallace could one day meet Chauncey—alive, of course, perhaps at a hotel where a blobby boy would be ready to take the luggage so long as there is a tip involved? The possibilities are endless! (Until Wallace meets Lucy. Then, all bets are off.)

The first time you share tea, you are a stranger. The second time you share tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share tea, you become family.

One of the biggest questions I get about this book is why is it set in a tea shop? I am fascinated by how different cultures can be even when they have common threads. Tea is the second-most-consumed drink in the world (water is first; beer is third). Almost every culture on earth has a custom or ritual involving tea. It is as ubiquitous as they come and has been for thousands of years. The same could be said about customs or rituals involving death. Death (obviously) came first in my planning of this book, and combining it with something as ancient as sharing tea felt right. Additionally, I thought about what felt safe and inviting to me, and I remembered all the times I’ve visited quaint and quiet little tea shops, sitting in an oversized chair while sipping on English Breakfast. I felt safe there, happy, even if it was momentary.

“It helps to laugh, even when you don’t feel like laughing. You can’t be sad when you’re laughing. Mostly.”

There is a meme that circulates online that I fall for every time. Why? I don’t know. Maybe part of me knows what its intended purpose is, but whenever I see the meme, I do exactly what it says. The meme? "It’s impossible for humans to smile widely and inhale through their nose at the same time." Stupid, right? Of course it’s possible! You can do it right now. And when you do, there is going to be a moment of . . . ahhhhhh. You feel better! It’s brief, sure, but for a moment, you are breathing, you are smiling. Laughter is often said to be the best medicine, and while it’s not a cure-all, I think it helps. We have so much to be upset about constantly—maybe it’s time we laugh in the face of absurdity.

I can’t grieve for myself.” Hugo shook his head slowly. “Of course you can. We do it all the time, regardless of if we’re alive or not, over the small things and the big things. Everyone is a little bit sad all the time.

That last line hits me hard. A variation of it was used in NBC’s The Good Place—as an aside: before Whispering Door became the book you’re reading, the idea was seeing Wallace enter the afterlife and deal with the insipid bureaucracy. However, as sometimes happens, someone else got there first and did it better than I ever could: namely, The Good Place. I went in a different direction, but some of the things I wanted to hit on remained, especially the idea of what grief is, and how it affects us. No two people grieve the same way, and yet, grief is universal. You live long enough to learn what love is, you know loss. And grief comes in many shapes and sizes: there are little deaths—the loss of opportunities or something going wrong at every turn—and there are big deaths—those that consume us until we feel like we’ve been hollowed out, leaving only pain. We can overcome, much of the time, but the fact still remains: we’re all a little bit sad all the time. That’s not a failure; that’s part of being human.

It’s not always about what we can or can’t have, but the work we put into it.”

This line from Hugo is, on a surface level, about his scones, and Wallace’s opinion of them. But it’s also a teachable moment for Wallace, who is used to having everything done his way when he wants it. Hugo is patient, Wallace is not. Hugo is kind, Wallace is not. Hugo is sure of himself, and Wallace thinks he is. I love the differences between these two, the way they fill in the empty spaces of each other with color. But I also think Wallace needs this far more than Hugo does, even if he can’t accept that. Wallace knows hard work; he wouldn’t have made it as far as he did in the corporate world if he didn’t. But he needs to learn that it isn’t everything, and it can’t be. There has to be more to life than the office.

Death isn’t a final ending, Wallace. It is an ending, sure, but only to prepare you for a new beginning.”

Look: I don’t know what happens when we close our eyes for the last time. My faith—if it could be called that—isn’t in a higher power, but in people. Messy, cruel, wonderful people. They disappoint me more than they make me happy, but there is nothing like humanity, even with all its faults. Maybe nothing happens when we go. Maybe everything happens. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s as I’ve written, and we are taken to a queer (in both senses of the word) little shop in the middle of the woods where kind, empathetic people are waiting for us with a hot cup of tea and a shoulder to lean on. After all, I think we deserve a bit of respite after the journey of life. A stop in our travels where we could think, breathe, and hope. I don’t know if we could ask for anything more.

Death has a beauty to it. We don’t see it because we don’t want to. And that makes sense. Why would we want to focus on something that takes us away from everything we know? How do we even begin to understand that there’s more than what we see?”

To me, this is the crux of the novel, the theme, the central argument. Death is scary. Of course it is! The idea that we just . . . stop—that everything stops—is as haunting as it is surreal. I can’t say that I know death better than others do, though I’ve experienced much of it in my life: people lost to violence, to illness, to accidents, to murder. I’ve known people who took their own lives because that was the only option they felt was left for them. My father and uncle died when I was five. My grandfather, a year later. Cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, acquaintances, people whom I’ve met once, only to find out later they passed. I wrote this book to understand my grief after losing someone close to me, the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. I don’t know that I got the answers I was looking for, but I did discover something about myself I did not expect: I am not afraid of death. When it is my time, I’ll go knowing I tried my best. And in that, I found the comfort I was so desperately searching for.

Wallace whispered, “It’s easy to let yourself spiral and fall.” “It is,” Nelson agreed. “But it’s what you do to pull yourself out of it that matters most.”

It’s easy to kick us when we’re down. And it’s frighteningly easy to allow those blows to fall, even as we try and cover ourselves as best we can. Getting up? Now, that’s hard. I know that firsthand. I know how it feels to spiral, to fall into a pit of toxicity disguised as grieving. Grief is inherently selfish because it’s about how it makes us feel as individuals, and that’s okay. But where it gets dangerous is if that grief, that toxicity, becomes everything you know. I’ve been there and oh, was I angry. At the world. At the people going about their lives as if mine hadn’t just been razed to the ground. I was furious at everyone and everything for continuing to exist as if I weren’t shattered into pieces. It took me a long time to crawl out of that pit, and there are days when I think I might be sliding back. Nelson is right: it might be hard to pick yourself back up, but that’s what counts. That’s the most important thing.

“It’s never enough, is it? Time. We always think we have so much of it, but when it really counts, we don’t have enough at all.”

If I could get a reader to take away anything from this novel, it’d be these lines spoken by Nelson. Even now, as I write this, it’s late January 2023, and we’re approaching the three-year anniversary since The House in the Cerulean Sea came out. It seems as if just yesterday, I was gearing up to release Under the Whispering Door, nervous about how readers would respond to such a deeply personal bit of writing. Time awaits no one. We are all prisoners of time because every single second that passes brings us closer to our inevitable end. We may not always focus on it, but we know it’s there, waiting. Which is why these words spoken by Nelson are my favorite part of the book. Nelson is, in a way, on borrowed time. He knows this. He did not stay because he thought Hugo needed to be fixed somehow. He didn’t stay because of Mei or Apollo. And he certainly didn’t stick around because of Wallace. Nelson knows time. He sees the passing of it from his spot in front of the fireplace. He also knows that every second counts to the living and the dead, and Wallace needs to realize that. Because of Nelson, Wallace can now focus on what is perhaps the most important thing of all: what will you do with the time you have left?