aAlexandra Fuller was riding in her pickup truck with her boyfriend, Till, in Wyoming when her cell phone rang. Their relationship was new and tense. Till was young, with “skin like alabaster,” and had problems with addiction, drugs, and self-harm. Alexandra (who everyone called “Bobo”) was still recovering from a breakup and didn’t feel like she was cut out for intimacy.
The drama between them was intense, but it faded into insignificance the moment Fuller turned around and saw a missed call from her ex-husband, Charlie. The news was devastating: their son, Fi, was just 21 and had died in his sleep. “With Fi gone, everything I ever believed in has disappeared,” she said.
Fi had just returned from Argentina, where the stress of exams and staying up late had led to an unexplained seizure. He returned to Wyoming in good spirits, just a little tired. He had always loved sports, playing tennis, lacrosse, hockey and mountain climbing. He was smart and self-aware, a good match for his two sisters and “the perfect son.” Now he’s gone, leaving his mother with “unimaginable pain” and “the loneliness I’ve never known.”
The book’s subtitle is misleading: It’s not Fi’s story (Fuller writes about his death in the epilogue to his previous, third, family memoir). Travel light and fastHer mother’s grief was greater than her own: she had already lost three of her four siblings as a child (one to meningitis, one when he was a week old, and one who drowned in her mother’s care), and more recently her father and divorce from Charlie. But losing Fi was on another level: “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt. I can’t even imagine it.”
Grief pushes her to the edge of reason. She doesn’t want to know why Hwi died. She won’t read the autopsy report, look at his health records, or meet his doctors. She won’t take a blood sample to see if she has the “gene, poison, or mistake” that killed him. Instead, she speaks to the hummingbirds and eagles that appear in the days after his death. Her magical thinking tells her they might carry a message for Hwi. His presence is not in what’s left behind—the ashes that she touches, which are “rougher than she expected”—but in the natural world. The birds, the storm, the doe, the double rainbow—they’re all somehow Hwi’s.
Friends flew in to see her, and they were kind, supportive, and full of good advice. They were a consolation for her mother and sister not attending Fi’s funeral; she has never forgiven them for writing about them in her award-winning 2002 memoir, “Don’t Go Dogs Tonight.” But only nature can ease her grief. On the first full moon after Fi’s death, she hiked to a camp by a mountain lake. And on the second full moon, Till towed a “sheep wagon” up to the plateau and set up a “grief camp” that Fuller ran on a “boarding-school schedule,” allowing her to write for eight hours a day.
What she needs is solitude and discipline: “Till comes and goes, more or less useful, more or less mad”. This discipline torments her. Her weight has dropped from nine stone to seven, and she is plagued by guilt as the strict mother she was, often leaving her children’s birthdays and school holidays to write their homework. When asked, “Who’s going to look after the kids?” she replies, “Oh, they’re fine,” “I’ve got an assault rifle.”
Life writers often want to be likeable writers, people who readers can sit down with and sympathize with. Fuller is not that type of person. She is raw and lonely and doesn’t care how she looks. Her exes tell her what a force of nature she is, and she acknowledges that she can be overbearing, overbearing, “defiant and know-it-all.” She’s not easy to be around, but that’s the point. She doesn’t spare the reader the pain of “the sharp knife of a short life.” Similarly, she won’t react in the same way as a mother whose loss of three children left her depressed and alcoholic.
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Fuller’s recovery program has several stages: massages by a naturopath in Taos, a beach vacation in Hawaii with her daughters Sarah and Cecily (and Till), a week at a nonprofit grief sanctuary in New Mexico, 10 days at a meditation center in Canada, where talking is forbidden. At one point, miraculously, she hears her daughters laugh, and after a humorous episode with a nosy cop, she and Till laugh too. By the end, she’s living in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by moose, bears, snakes and porcupines. She hasn’t found Fi, but she has found “settling ground,” a kind of peace in the wilderness that comes with being in the arms of a trusted old flame.
