“What I meant was, since we both had more days behind us than we have ahead, how about we try to figure out what more we can do to pump up the volume? It’s not that our life is boring. Well, maybe it is a little.”

McMillan sets the novel’s tone early as Loretha expresses her desire for life to pick up the pace. She feels her life has stalled and wants to inject excitement into it. Her words foreshadow Carl’s death, which occurs just pages after her assertion about how few days they have ahead of them.

“It’s like they’re sitting around just waiting to die. But I do not subscribe to the belief that it’s all downhill from here. Life isn’t over at sixty-five. I feel like a car. As long as I change the oil and rotate the tires, I can get plenty more mileage out of it. Easier said than done.”

Referring to the novel’s title in Chapter 1 sets the tone for Loretha’s motivation and character goals. However, her use of the phrase does not match her analogy. Rather than expressing how to enhance and improve an old car, she portrays simply maintaining it and hoping it still runs. This becomes problematic to her overall beliefs and challenges her understanding of what the phrase “it’s all downhill from here” means.

“I’ve been trying to do what needs to be done, but I was not prepared for this hole Carl left in my heart, in my life. How in the world am I going to fill it? And with what? And where on earth do I go from here?”

Loretha is unprepared for Carl’s death and struggles with finding Resilience in the Face of Personal Loss. She became dependent on Carl’s presence and must now learn to be an individual again.