Nonfiction Book Review: Four Funerals and a Wedding

If you’ve lost people close to you or experienced a long season of loss or grief, here’s something you may relate to: I’m now interested in learning more about grief and loss. Probably not a surprise. And as I’ve considered writing about my experiences, I’ve also become interested in memoir.

These interests intersected as I listened to an episode of the podcast QWERTY by memoir writer and teacher Marion Roach Smith.

Author Jill Smolowe was discussing her book Four Funerals and a Wedding: Resilience in a Time of Grief and said something very intriguing about the five stages of grief. You know, the stages we always hear about. And that we all take as etched in stone. The thing is, the researcher who developed the five stages, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, was working with terminally ill patients at the end of their lives and facing imminent death.

For people who are caregivers to or relatives of someone who dies, the five stages in fact do not usually happen. Another researcher, George Bonnano, interviewed people in this category and learned that roughly a third of those people were resilient in the face of grief. While the loss does hurt and takes time to process, they are not knocked flat or completely consumed by grief. They grieve but continue living. Life does go on.

That fact got my attention. And thankfully, I found Jill Smolowe’s book at my library.

In the book, Smolowe tells the story of her husband’s diagnosis with leukemia, his treatment over a grueling six month period, the continuing side-effects and checkups as he went into remission and returned to his normal life for a couple years. And then his sudden death.

In the same year that her husband died, Smolowe’s mother-in-law, her mother, and her younger sister also all passed away. Some of the deaths were expected. Others, such as her sister’s, were not.

As the year unfolded and each tragedy loomed ahead, she kept expecting to collapse under the weight of it all. But a collapse never happened.

Jill Smolowe is a former journalist for Time, Newsweek, and People and you can see her writing skill in the details she provides about her experiences. She has also thought long and hard about what she went through and, in fact, eventually became a certified grief coach after her book was published.

She is beautifully articulate in describing her thoughts, feelings, and decisions at each point along the way.

Shortly after this terrible year, Smolowe met a man who had also lost his wife to an untimely death. She describes the guilt and caution she felt about dating again combined with the knowledge that she has a lot of life left to live. She remembers that her husband had not wanted her to pine away for the rest of her life.

In her mid-fifties at the time of her husband’s death (he was age 64) with a teenage daughter, she continues the new relationship but does not remarry right away. She completes her memoir three years after her husband’s passing. And as she was finalizing the book her boyfriend proposed. They married six weeks after she finished the book.

One thing that becomes clear in this memoir is the huge support system Smolowe and her husband had, the very active and engaged life she led. I confess to being a tad jealous of her wide range of friends and acquaintances. And the maturity of her family, though she doesn’t hide the prickly relationship she and her mother seemed to have until near the end of her mother’s life. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have so many social connections. They obviously gave her strength and resilience and I can get a glimpse of why psychologists are forever telling us of the importance of connections. (Though I wonder what are those of us from broken or dysfunctional families supposed to do?)

I completely understand Smolowe’s drive to research and read all she could when her husband was first diagnosed, at each stage of his treatment, when he died, and then as she grieved. I want to read the book that really helped her at this last stage: The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss by George A. Bonanno.

Smolowe includes these statistics from Bonnano’s work about the three types of grief:

1. People who are overwhelmed by grief for 18 months or more (about 15% of people) experience chronic grief.
2. Those who grieve for about 18 months but no more (20% of people) experience acute grief.
3. Over 50% of people “return to normal functioning within about 6 months”. This is resilience.

Reading Bonnano’s book helped her see that, “Like most bereaved people, I was experiencing waves of sorrow interspersed with restorative thoughts, conversations, and activities that helped me withstand, rather than be overwhelmed by, my pain.”

If you enjoy memoirs or want to understand grief, I highly recommend Four Funerals and a Wedding. I’ve read very few memoirs until recently – there were too many other interesting books to read. None that I saw really resonated with me or my experiences. But as I now read more memoirs, the best ones feel a lot like novels in the way the story unfolds and the author/narrator reveals her thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Smolowe’s memoir is one of those.

I also found great hope in realizing that possibly I, too, may have experienced such resilience. Perhaps if I experienced my mother’s passing without the subsequent other losses that took place in the same few months, the grief from that would have been clearer to me. As it was, it was tangled in other feelings and losses and emotions.

I remember being very judgmental of myself in my grieving. First telling myself I wasn’t grieving enough, then later telling myself I was grieving too much. As if there is a proper way to grieve. It was nice to read that Smolowe had similar thoughts in her own grief.

It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that each person grieves in their own way and there is no one right way. And each experience within our lives will be unique, as well. We don’t live in a vacuum and we don’t experience our losses in a vacuum. Each touches the other in the timeless cycles of our lives.

Smolowe has created a comforting and insightful look at her unique and difficult grief journey, discovering a resilience she didn’t know she had and shining new understanding on what it means to grieve.

Her book can bring hope to readers in the midst of their own experiences of illness or loss. Even if you have yet to lose a loved one, this book can bring you understanding as you encourage or support those around you who have.  

Book cover by carynwrites
Flower on album by Lolame from Pixabay/filtered from original