Alexandra Fuller learned the art of denial from her gloriously dysfunctional parents. “‘Mum’s having a bit of a wobbly,’ Dad would explain, that dangerous British habit of underestimating the gravity of any given situation until you were eating the last sled dog and writing your final diary entries.”
In “Fi,” her latest memoir (she’s published four, including “Don’t Go to the Dogs Tonight,” which was a Times Notable Book of 2002), Fuller writes, “It was normal for people in our circles to prefer their animals over their children and to die young — of gin, guns and other accidents of the soul. Certainly no one we knew outlived their hips or knees; we were raised in the expectation of short, colorful lives.”
An example of the family’s stoicism: Fuller experienced the funeral of her toddler sister “with no displays of real emotion.”
She warns the reader that it will get so much worse after that, “the body count.” It does.
Her mother tried to kill herself — “all the pills, waving a gun; everyone was talking about it” — and then her granny tried too. But, Fuller writes, “the less said the better my mother told us, a phrase we heard a lot as kids: under the table, under the rug, under wraps.”
In “Fi,” Fuller leaves nothing under the table, under the rug or under wraps. Even when things continue to get so much worse, when the body count includes her beloved son, Fi (pronounced Fee).
There was no warning or explanation. There had been seizures but Fi had been pronounced fine. He was 21.
A parent is prejudiced, of course, but we trust Fuller when she raves about Fi. “He was so alive his whole life, for years and years. He was “smart, hilarious, earnest, self-aware.”
Fuller doesn’t spare the reader the moment when she faced Fi’s death. With her two daughters outside weeping, she sat with his body. “Our perfect son is dead; the perfect son is dead; a perfect son is dead,” she writes.
Nor does she spare us the next step: “The sound of an incinerator, it’s a roar. Headfirst, he came out. Feetfirst, he went in. And then the doors closed.”
Wasting away, losing weight, Fuller tracks her journey through her grief. Early on, she goes camping near an alpine lake. For a while, she lives in a sheep wagon — 16 feet long, 8 feet wide, meant for shepherds guarding their flocks. There, she meditates and writes: “It’s getting harder to leave my ‘deep mountain grief.’”
Fuller releases her son’s ashes in a stream. “‘I’m letting you go,’ I told Fi. ‘Wherever it is you’re needed, go there.’” She promises to find him.
Back at her condo, Fuller goes into a tailspin: “People told me now that I must get over it. They insisted my girls needed me. Fi’d have wanted me to be happy, they said, the same people who’d told me the death of their own child would have killed them.”
Next she visits a “grief sanctuary” in New Mexico to work with a bodyworker. “Either you’ll have to fix me, or I’ll have to die here,” she tells the woman. There is yoga and breath work and writing letters and then burning them.
Fuller searches elsewhere for answers but discovers there are few to be had when a parent loses a child. Maybe one answer: time. Fuller’s friend Cait said, “I felt like my brain was hijacked for about a year after Ollie died.”
“Are you over it now?” Fuller asked.
Cait tells her it took her a long time to feel joy again but, she says, “We made it. That’s what I want you to hear.”
Fuller sticks Post-it notes on a mirror, a door and above the kettle: “We DO make it.”
She writes, “How did I know we’d make it? I don’t know; I didn’t know. People do, though.”
The last thing you expect to do when you read a book about a child dying is to laugh. Reading “Fi,” you do, though — or, like Fuller, you “laugh-cry,” like the emoji. The wit in this memoir is soul-piercing. It’s part of what saves Fuller, and it saves the reader as we move through the stages of her loss and grief to a kind of acceptance that life will never be the same as it had been.
Fuller is sagacious and perspicacious. She is a sublime writer. In the hands of another memoirist, the story of Fi might be unbearably sad, but this book is a mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss — surviving life.
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