The lost mother
The primary symbol coloring Georgie's character is the loss of her mother. She can't fathom it. She doesn't understand why the universe needs to have death, and all this can be viewed as a symbol. Without a mother, this woman is in existential panic, symbolizing the problem of mortality. Instead of knowing death in some abstract way, she knows it concretely, and the panic it induces is truly mortifying, because she now knows that she is not immune from death herself.
Francesco del Cossa's art
The art of her mother is a symbol in Georgie's life for the way that, through mourning her mother, she tries to rescue some of her mother from obscurity by accepting her ideas as her own. She struggles to identify with the art that her mother loved, and through the journey, she invokes the spirit of the painter to help her mourn; now she is able to appreciate the art in a spiritual way, thus awakening a piece of her mother in herself, she feels.
Time as a mystery
Throughout the book, Georgie reflects on time through motif. She thinks about the passage of time in daily life. She also considers more broadly the confusing nature of history. She knows that life and death and mysterious, more mysterious than she believed possible, because she knew factually that all living animals died, but now that her mother has literally died, she struggles to fathom that she and her mother were animals just like other animals, and that she were mortal at all. Time is the symbolic method of death for everyone, and she doesn't see that until her mother is gone.
Incomprehensible death
Death is an incomprehensible problem that Georgie can only seem to understand indirectly, because it feels impossible for her to believe her mother could die. This misunderstanding is symbolic. It shows that to Georgie, her mother was godlike and eternal, and the suspicion that she were immortal was wrong, but now Georgie has to wonder why nature made her feel that way about her mother in the first place. She is in the territory of religious philosophy, approaching either some euphoric breakthrough or some breakdown where she will panic and suffer—probably she will encounter both.
The sublime
When Francesco del Cossa arrives in the story, we see that there are ghosts in this novel. Georgie is struggling to make sense of mysteries that Francesco still struggles with in the afterlife, and they help each other. This is a tangible depiction of the sublime spiritual element of reality that is often very near to those who are experiencing severe suffering or loss. This symbolizes Georgie's religious process of mourning, codifying her mother's memory in new spiritual experiences of herself.
