…moths don’t argue the case against their transformation; that’s what I’ve never seen a wild creature do. They just transform, perfectly.” –Alexandra Fuller
Earlier this summer, contemplating retirement, I asked my Facebook friends for their favorite quotations or poems about transitions. A parent in my school recommended Fi by Alexandra Fuller. Another memoir about grief? Really? How would that connect to transition?
Still, trusting the recommender and having both a credit on Audible and a long drive ahead of me, I started to listen. Fuller, a National Geographic journalist with a number of other memoirs, narrates the audiobook, sharing the story of her 21-year old son Fi’s unexpected death and the grief that consumed her in the days and months that followed. Fuller tries to make sense of life without her boy in it, evoking him in breathtaking specificity. We come to know Fi in his mother’s anecdotes and memories–a tiny ice hockey demon, a youngster much loved in their small community, a beloved brother—and we mourn his death with Fuller and his two sisters, Sarah and Cecily. We feel we are in the room with Fuller as she struggles to parent her daughters, as she agonizes about how to choose life over unmitigated despair.
Motherhood and grief both transform you. It takes nine months for a baby to grow; for Fuller, it took almost nine months before she could start to make any sense of Fi’s death. She recognizes that grief is harrowing and never ending, but by the end of a different kind of gestation, she has found a path: she is, as she explains, a mountain. The memoir chronicles her thoughts and questions and fury and love and despair counterpointed against a number of landscapes, rendered exquisitely. It is also a study on motherhood–what does it mean to mother children, to love them, to raise them, to lose them? Fuller invites us into her mother-love, and it is a fearsome, enormous, all-consuming love. We mourn with her on the page.
Grief is hard, desperate, all-consuming work. There are times when Fuller is selfish, mean, unable to receive kindness; we both ache and empathize. She doesn’t pretty anything up–she shares all of her story–the demise of her marriage; her own estrangement from her sister and mother; the loss of a sister when she, herself, was a child; the war she witnessed growing up in Zimbabwe.
Remarkably, though, Fi is not a depressing story–sad, yes, but never grim. I suspect this is because Fuller is such a talented storyteller. Traveling through grief transforms us–we are not who we were before an enormous loss but emerge changed, a new version of ourselves. Wild things, she explains, do not fight transitions, transformations. They move through each stage, unprotesting. Fuller fights and surrenders in her journey that is immediate, revelatory, unflinching, intimate. I felt as though she was sharing a long episode of The Moth Radio Hour. Several times I wept and several times I laughed. Fuller knows that our job as human beings, as authors, and as readers, is to “hug the whole experience.” She is tender, fierce, anguished, and resilient. I adored her.
Fuller’s writing is full of lists–she piles adjectives on top of each other. Mentions of Greek mythology, poetry, cultural practices around death, Lakota and other indigenous traditions, a love of the wilderness and the mountains, questions about faith–ranging from her Episcopalian upbringing to her exploration of Eastern practices–are never forced but did make me think she is a remarkably well-read person. She is a seeker who will never stop learning or collecting wisdom. Many asides–all of which are, in fact, relevant–contribute to the conversational, almost breathless, tone. Moving easily from the everyday to the erudite and back again, hers is a quicksilver intelligence. Characters are evoked swiftly with memorable details such as Megan, who wears high heels in the mountains and is accompanied by a tiny apricot dog. The crafting of scenes seems effortless–Fuller zooms in and out and offers commentary on her own learning. The story moves quickly and she covers a lot of ground–metaphorically and literally. Her spirit of adventure and her writing about the natural world as a powerful teacher inspired me. When, after time alone on a mountain, time in her sheep wagon, time spent with a healer in New Mexico, time at a retreat with Sarah, and, finally, a silent retreat in Canada, Fuller begins to build a yurt on a patch of land teeming with life, we know she is emerging from the profound depths of sorrow.
A mother’s quest to find a lost child never ends. We understand Fuller will seek Fi everywhere–in the adolescent mule deer, in the phases of the moon, in her own dreams. She moves forward, but she carries her beloved boy with her, always. One of the last moments in the book describes the Sandhill cranes Fuller hears beyond her newly-built sanctuary. They mate for life, she explains, and when one dies, the other continues calling. Fuller writes, “But they don’t stop calling is the point. You can only do your side of the song. I can only do mine.”
She will sing her side of the song for the rest of her life, but she has also chosen to live. When I finished the book, I realized Fuller’s style–her intimacy and spontaneity–is, in fact, beautifully designed. I immediately requested all of her other books from the library. I am grateful to have read and listened to this story and grateful, too, to have the chance to share it.