How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can't remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze through the room that made Bonnie twist on her rope. She spun slowly, and at one point her face broke out of the seaweed of balloons, showing us the reality of the death she'd chosen. It was a world of blackening eye sockets, blood pooling in lower extremities, stiffening joints. (4.207)
The boys believe that they are rescuing the Lisbon girls on the night of their suicides, but instead the sisters involve the boys as witnesses to their terrible deaths. Bonnie, hanging in the room where they'd partied only a year before, brings home the horrible reality of death. It's a traumatizing sight; they don't see the "peaceful" aftermath of an overdose or carbon monoxide death, but the more gruesome result of a hanging. (The film spares us those visual details, btw.)
Quote #5
As for the other girls, autopsies were performed on each of them, in accordance with a state law requiring investigation in all deaths by suicide. [. . .] A single coroner, brought from the city with two fatigued assistants, opened up the girls' brains and body cavities, peering inside at the mystery of their despair. (5.5)
The girls' young bodies aren't damaged (besides the self-inflicted injuries that cause their deaths), so the image of the coroner looking in their brains and bodies for a sign of why they died is almost absurd. The message is that the reason for their suicides is beyond anything the coroner can see.
Quote #6
After the suicide free-for-all, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up the attempt to lead a normal life. Mrs. Lisbon stopped attending church, and when Father Moody went to the house to console her, no one answered the door. (5.9)
This is all we need to know about the effects of the deaths on Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. They withdraw completely.