Beach Music

Loggerhead sea turtles are specifically a symbol of Lucy’s nurturing love and more generally of maternal love. Lucy dedicates a lot of time and attention to relocating the loggerheads’ threatened nests onto safer stretches of beach so that the eggs have a chance of hatching. She runs a volunteer program to keep an eye on the nests and then release the baby turtles when they hatch. Lucy pours love and attention into this project even though it is illegal for her to interfere with the turtle nests, as they are a protected species. The sea turtles are symbolic maternal nurturing: a mother-knows-best, stubborn, persistent type of nurturing which has down sides, but which is ultimately effective.

After Lucy dies, one of her volunteers finds a stray turtle hatchling that appears to be dead. Jack and Lucy swim the turtle out into the ocean, past the harsh breaking waves, with the hope that it will revive in water. The turtle survives, marking an evolution in the symbolism of the turtles; they come to represent the love that Lucy’s children and grandchildren feel for her, even after she is gone. Like the turtle, it is a love that lives on.

The Lady of the Coins is the name that Ruth and Shyla gave to the statue of the Virgin Mary behind which Ruth hid her dress with the coin buttons when hiding from Nazis during WWII. Ruth prayed to that statue and visited it to feel a sense of connection with her lost family by touching the dress her mother had sewn. In this way, the Lady of the Coins is a symbol of help and succor offered when needed.

However, the Lady of the Coins also represents the dire circumstances that forced Ruth to ask for this help. When Shyla hallucinates, haunted by grief and desperation of her mother’s story, she sees the Lady of the Coins. The symbol of the Lady of the Coins reinforces The Potency of Generational Trauma while also standing in for the sacrifices of others that helped Ruth survive the Holocaust.