Reflective Blog for Chapter 15

I loved the beginning of this chapter. Milkman was so happy and joyful that he had found his family's history. He was so nice and playful with Sweet when he went to the quarry to go swimming. Milkman was exulting that his great-grandfather could fly. The whole mood was very tangible and cute. But I could tell that things were going to start getting bad because the issue with Guitar had still yet gotten resolved.
When Milkman came to Pilate's house and after she knocked him unconscious with a wine bottle, he finally came to realize some things that made his life come full circle and possess some meaning: he realized that he was petty and selfish to be dreaming of living and flying whilst Hagar was dying.
I liked the irony found in Pilate's situation when she found out from Milkman that she wasn't hauling around a random white guy's bones with her all of these years, but she was carrying her father's. It was also satisfying to see that Milkman was taking responsibility of "his body," a.k.a. Hagar's hair.
Another thing I'd like to point out was Pilate's surrender of her father's ties when she gave up her earring that held the only word her father had ever wrote in his life, her name. If she wouldn't have gotten shot by Guitar she probably would have stopped talking to her father's ghost because it was her closure.
When Milkman sang "Sugargirl, don't leave me here," I thought that also brought Pilate's life full circle because she sang that song for Mr. Smith right before he died.
A symbol of flight and death and life after death could have been when a bird that Milkman had woken up with his singing came and dove in the new grave and took Pilate's earring and flew away into the sky. Milkman said that he had loved Pilate so much because she had known how to fly without leaving the ground, which reemphasizes the bird taking her earring being the symbolism of her physical ascent into heaven.
I absolutely love the last sentence of the book. It describes the whole point of the novel in one tiny sentence. Basically, if you give up all of the things that are burdening you, you can fly! In order for Milkman to fly he had to die because living turned out to be such a hard thing for him to do. The important thing though was that he eventually did get to fly.