Winterson’s novel provides a window into how individuals experience grief during periods of a loved one’s illness. Following her lover’s diagnosis, the narrator’s perception of the human body undergoes a marked poetic shift. Until Louise’s illness, the narrator describes her lover using erotic imagery—indeed, Louise is defined as a briny sea anemone; a flexing and recalcitrant steed; a seaside olive tree bearing refreshing, saline fruit. The lover’s body is an absorbent tabula rasa on which desire leaves its inscriptions and imprints. Following diagnosis, though, these dreamy phenomenological expressions of the body are somewhat subdued—and, while the narrator’s characterizations of the leukaemic body neither lose poetic intensity nor become estranged from their own kind of peculiar beauty—they come to describe a biological state that is abruptly finite. At one memorable instant, the author realizes the inadequacy of language to describe Louise’s body: “Frontal bone, palatine bones, nasal bones, lacrimal bones, cheek bones, maxilla, vomer, inferior conchae, mandible. […] those words don’t remind me of your face” (132). In grieving Louise, the narrator falters between anatomical vocabulary and the language of love, revealing perhaps that the fullness of healing cannot be had within the margins of human language alone.