Stone Yard Devotional

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, mental illness, and illness or death.

In Stone Yard Devotional, the unnamed protagonist and narrator undergoes a personal journey as she isolates herself at an abbey in her hometown and confronts her need for others’ forgiveness. As she looks back on her life, she finds that there is a lot she does not want to remember or acknowledge. There is a lot of pain from the death of her parents, as well as stress from her work in protecting the environment and leaving her husband and friends. She views her life as a procession of rooms that she cannot see clearly and wants to move away from: “When I think about the phases of my life, it is a series of rooms behind me, each with a door to a previous room left open, behind which is another room, and another and another […] I don’t like to think about them much” (80-81). The protagonist struggles to face her life because of her many regrets, whether it be her treatment of Helen Parry or her perceived failures as a daughter. Regardless, her preoccupation with the past at times prevents her from being engaged in the present.