Summary
"Spring" opens with Ben and Amie's relationship. After reconnecting at Nina and Maura's wedding, they go on a date in Central Park, and many dates follow. Because they have an emotional connection from writing letters to each other, they experience ease and comfort in being together in person. Amie meets Ben’s parents, and they hit it off. They swap teaching horror stories and Amie notices his mom flash him an approving look. This look temporarily throws Amie off until his father brings up the strings, reminding her how comfortable she feels with them and Ben. On one spring day, when Amie is heading to meet Ben in Central Park, she knows he will propose. She heads towards the Van Woosley and faces the fact that if she marries Ben, she'll never live here. Ben wants a small house in the suburbs, and Amie is on board with this too. But when nursing her wound of a lost dream, she realizes the courtyard of the Van Woosley is empty. She then realizes she's never seen anyone there, and it suddenly feels devoid of life. She goes to Central Park to meet Ben, and when he proposes, she says yes.
The short-stringer support group meets at the New York Public Library to see the sculpture Strung Together, commissioned for the first anniversary of the arrival of the strings. It is a tree sculpture with strings of 500 people in place of leaves. We see the evolution of the treatment of the boxes—museums are taking donations of boxes as artifacts, people are keeping them as family heirlooms, and others are using them as urns. This generation of 22-year-olds is increasingly deciding not to open their boxes.
"Several Years Later" begins with Javier. He has been an exemplary soldier and is facing the end of his life alone since his family and fellow army men don't know that he is a short-stringer. Javier has left a letter for his parents explaining the switch underneath his mattress to ease their confusion once he passes. On his last day on Earth, Javi reports to an emergency recovery of the shot-down aircraft of a pilot and two medical personnel in enemy territory. Javi and Captain Reynolds find the survivors, and one of them is Anika Singh. They receive a report that hostile forces are approaching them moments before they hear the enemies coming in their direction. Javier offers to be a decoy, so while everyone else mounts the plane, Javi remains alone. Captain Reynolds decides to get the civilians to safety, but he reminds himself that Javier has a long string, so he'll survive. Javier takes out the old prayer card that Jack gave him, the card from Gertrude who gave it to her betrothed Simon. Javier reads the prayer aloud, knowing that he isn't dying alone. Javier dies in combat.
Captain Reynolds sends the letter Javier left to his parents. The letter is a confession explaining that he switched strings with a close friend. His parents know who it is and send it to Jack as they are unsure what to do with this confession. While Javier isn't the first short-stringer to die in combat, he is the first soldier to die and spark suspicion of fraud. Jack knows the army leaders are concealing Javier's death to buy President Rollins more time to win re-election. Jack decides to do the right thing despite the consequences. Jack takes the letter to the Johnson Foundation, a nonprofit started by Wes Johnson to provide resources for short-stringers and fight the inequities they face. When Jack arrives, he meets Maura, the newly appointed director of communications. He tells her the truth about the switch and gives her the scanned letter. The year prior, the truth about the assailant from Anthony's rally in New York came out. Her letter exposes that she is a grieving sister who knew about Anthony's involvement in her brother's death 20 years prior. While there were calls for impeachment, Rollins denied involvement in the death and any knowledge of that being her true motive. While he wasn't impeached, the controversy decreased the chance of Anthony's re-election. Jack's motivation is to add to the negative press and make Rollins lose the re-election, which he succeeds in doing.
Maura's parents ask Nina to deliver the eulogy at Maura's funeral. Maura had a rare heart abnormality, but Nina delivers a eulogy that focuses on Maura's life, not her death. Maura's job at the Johnson Foundation was her sixth job, but the first one that felt like a good fit. In Nina's eulogy, she speaks about how we don't judge a love story by its length, and that her relationship with Maura felt deep and whole despite its length. After the funeral, Nina stays with her parents for a few weeks and then returns home to finish the book she has been working on for three years. It is a compilation of stories inspired by the strings and people using their strings for good. After getting Javier's letter, Maura led the STAR Initiative's defeat in the Supreme Court. Jack became a minor celebrity after releasing the letter and now works at a nonprofit supporting PTSD-inflicted veterans. He's married and expecting his second child.
Before dying, Maura begs Nina to continue being the rock that Amie, Ben, and their children need. She asks her to be a rock for herself too, and keep making plans. Amie and Ben have two children, Willie and Midge, and they're married and living in a small house in the suburbs. Amie is five months pregnant when they get married and Ben immediately put a down payment on the house. While planning for Ben's death, Amie decides to stay in their family home with her children rather than move back to New York because of the beautiful memories shared there. In Ben's final days, Ben tells Nina and Amie that he's satisfied—satisfied that the truth of his string was forced upon him so that he got to spend the happiest years of his life with his family and could plan so that he didn't leave his family in surprise disarray. We learn that having children has helped Amie stop living in her head and dreaming of fantasy lives. She no longer struggles with what-ifs because she knows this is the life she wants to live. Everything is arranged for Ben's passing—Willie and Midge's college savings accounts and the house are paid off, and everything is as ready as it can be for his death.
In a surprise turn of events, a car strikes Amie and Ben's car on their way to Ben's doctor's appointment. They die together, creating a loss no one prepared for. Nina searches for Amie's box and finds that Amie and Ben have strings of the same length. Nina adopts Willie and Midge without hesitation and sells her home in New York to move into their family home. They remind her so much of Amie that being with them is like having a piece of her always. Every few weeks Nina takes Willie and Midge into the city and they stay at the hotel that was Ben's last project in the city. One evening in the city, Nina leads the children to Amie's bench in Central Park. For her and Ben's 10th anniversary, she used the money she'd saved over nine years to gift Ben a bench with the quote that started their letter exchange: "No matter what happens, I still feel the same." Nina reflects and feels grateful that Amie never opened her box and didn't have to feel the anguish Maura lived with.
We see how different the world has become 15 years after the boxes first arrived—people no longer generally see short-stringers as dangerous and depressed, but rather as purposeful and open to life. People don t-shirts with phrases like Live Like Your String Is Short, and former President Rollins now rarely appears on the news. The number of people deciding not to open their boxes has risen significantly since the boxes first arrived. The book ends with the man on his bicycle, still paddling throughout New York, playing music on the stereo strapped to his back. "Que sera, sera."
Analysis
"Spring" opens with the train motif revisited. The train and string thus far have been used to symbolize death. But here, we also recognize the train as providing a look into what is happening within society. In earlier sections, we see Ben on a mostly empty train during rush hour, in the middle of The Measure we see the train mimicking the fear of death mounting within people in society, and now we see how the strings have become a more integrated part of society. As Ben is sitting on the train, he hears two teenagers referencing a dating TV show ad behind them with both a long-stringer and a short-stringer spin-off. They speak about it normally and Ben notes how overhearing conversations about strings is no longer filled with dread or anger—it's a part of everyday noise (p. 320). This also portrays the changing public perception of short-stringers, as the only difference the girls note about the separate spin-offs is that there'll be more drama in the one about short-stringers. We see this change further supported in Nina's recounting of the differences in the public acceptance of short-stringers when she notes the frequent emblazoned Live Like Your String Is Short phrase on different apparel and media.
When the short-stringers visit the New York Public Library to see the Strung Together commissioned sculpture, we hear the artist's reasoning behind the sculpture, through which we find the further exemplification of the theme of permanence within The Measure. The artist explains that we have an impulse to mark our existence in a way that feels permanent. He uses the imagery of carving "I was here" on desks at school, on the bark of trees, and spray-painting it on walls. He explains how the sculpture, a tree of life with the strings of real people replacing the leaves, proves that these people lived and were here (p. 322). The motif of the Tree of Life also supports the theme of interconnectedness throughout this book. We also see support for this theme in the symbol of Javier's prayer card. When Javier approaches death, we learn that Gertrude is the original owner of the Jewish prayer card. Gertrude gave it to Simon, Simon gave it to Grandpa Cal, Grandpa Cal gave it to Jack, and Jack to Javi. This interconnectedness is present even in Javier's last moments and gives him hope that he will not die alone as he reads aloud the words the cards owners have all read aloud (p. 329).
The presentation of and support for the strings as a gift highlight the theme of fortune and perspective. Every person seems to have a different perspective on how the strings are a gift, but we see similarities in how Captain Reynolds and Ben see the gift of the strings. When Reynolds has to make the call to leave Garcia to bring the civilians to safety, he remembers what his commander told him: the true gift of the strings is that no soldier would have to die alone because the knowledge of when he would die allows him to choose his path accordingly (p. 328). Similarly, days before his death Ben tells Amie and Nina that he's satisfied that the truth about his string was forced on him because he has spent the happiest years of his life with his family (p. 342). This is a full circle moment, as earlier in the book, Ben hoped that one day he would be able to see the gift in his string. Similarly, the gift of the strings for long-stringers who love short-stringers is that it removes the what-ifs and the uncertainty about what they could have done differently and removes any feeling of fault. The short string lets their loved ones know the amount of life they received is how long their lives were always going to be, removing the what-ifs from grief.
In "Spring" and "Several Years After" we see the development of the motif of the string, namely, the evolving relationship between the strings and people. Firstly, we see the string as a metaphor for life when Nina finds Amie's string. Erlick writes that Nina held her sister's life in her hands when she held the string (p. 343), which makes the string a metaphor for human life. We see further support for the strings as a metaphor for life in Nina's point of view when she thinks that the length of the string doesn't matter because while the beginning and end are predetermined, the middle is left to be woven and shaped by us (p. 348). This also relates to the theme of control and the power we do have over our lives as humans. We have seen how the fixation on taking control of the end date is a fruitless pursuit of ultimate control. Our having control of the middle is also illustrated in "Winter" with the imagery of the marriage bureau being near the birth and death certificate building. This image presents the perspective that what happens between birth and death is up to us.
Toward the end of The Measure, we see a new measure taking shape. In Nina's eulogy, she decides to speak about Maura's life rather than her death. Nina uses chapters as a metaphor for different points of our life and says while in the story of their life together, Nina has more chapters, Maura's were the chapters you couldn't put down. She speaks about all Maura did in her life—how she found a job that was a perfect fit, and how their love felt deep and whole despite its short length (p. 338). In Nina's eulogy, she uses a different measure for Maura's life: the depth of their love, her adventurous nature, her impact, and her dedication. This is similar to Ben's decision to live on through the buildings he creates, as we see his children and sister-in-law staying at his last project, a hotel in Manhattan (p. 345). Through the end of the book, we see people question how they measure their life. Earlier in a letter to Ben, as expounded upon in an earlier section, Amie questions if the point of the inscription on the box—The measure of your life lies within—is just that: that we get to decide how we measure our life. At the end of the book, we see that 15 years after the arrival of the boxes, fewer and fewer young people are deciding to open their boxes (p. 348). This tells us that people are coming around to the notion that they get to decide how to measure their own lives and that the most important part of our lives is the part left to us to shape.
