Who could have imagined that in the two decades since, life would give her material for three more grief memoirs, written in the spaces between a novel and several other nonfiction books. In “Leaving Before the Rains Come” (2016), she documented the painful end of her long marriage; in “Travel Light, Move Fast” (2019), the passing of her beloved, complicated father. Then, in that book’s epilogue, she revealed that as bad as things may have seemed, they were now much worse: Her sister and mother had stopped speaking to her, the romance that saved the day post-divorce was over, and, dwarfing every other possible misery, her 21-year-old son had died.
She returns to these difficult topics in “Fi: A Memoir,” a book that is as hard to pick up as it is to put down — a gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read. Toward the end of the memoir, Fuller quotes Franz Kafka: “A book must be an axe to the frozen sea inside us.” This book is a sharp ax. By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.
Fi was the nickname her son, Charles Fuller Ross, chose for himself. He was as lively and dear and beloved in their small “Wydaho” community as a boy can be. His death in 2018 was almost completely out of left field. “Three days ago, I’d walked with him along the Snake River — distracted,” Fuller writes. “He’d been home only a few days from Argentina, where he’d had the first inexplicable seizure at the end of his semester abroad — stress of finals, late nights studying, packing up to come home.” Then he had another seizure, and a week later, he died. That is all Fuller knows about it — she did not care to read the autopsy report or join the meeting his father had with the doctors and the medical examiner.
“It’s not only that I didn’t want to know the details of what the experts could only speculate had been the cause of Fi’s seizures and therefore the cause of his death; it’s mostly that I didn’t have time for guesses. I wanted to know for certain: where, now, is my only begotten, beloved son?”
Where he is, now, is in this book she has written — and also, incidentally, in a lovely series of articles in the online journal Medium by his sister Sarah Ross. The biggest challenge and also the saving grace of the period after Fi’s death was the fact that Fuller has two other children, who still very much needed a functioning mother. Sarah, then 24, and Cecily, then 13, were extraordinarily close to their brother, which had been partly their mother’s doing and also her joy. “Because of the rupture from my siblings, the lifetime of pain it’d been, I’d soldered my children to one another.”
Fuller came to this responsibility prepared, having been mothered herself by a woman scalded by the loss of two infants and a toddler who drowned. “Everyone has always said that my mother’s bouts of blackout drinking, her suicide attempts, her periods of insanity make sense. People have always told me that I should understand this; when a mother loses a child, her surviving children lose a mother. But I didn’t lose my mother; she hung on, mothering away, dragging and coaxing and encouraging us when she could, how she could; ignoring us and poisoning herself when she couldn’t. I didn’t lose a mother when she lost my siblings; that was my mother, marinated in grief but also tough, glamorous, heartbroken, capable, creative, resilient, determined to have a ball anyway.”
For reasons that are not discussed in the book but may have something to do with Fuller’s memoirs, her mother is completely absent from her life now. To have to go through this tragedy without the support of close family adds bitterness to the flavor profile of Fuller’s pain, and it’s particularly confounding to read that her ex-husband, Charlie, flew over to spend time with her mother and sister in Africa. Fortunately, Fuller does have one ferociously committed ally, a woman named Till, a younger ex-lover who — though Fuller rejects her, refuses to sleep with her or even talk to her (she communicates with flash cards), and generally treats her like an incompetent servant — refuses to let her be totally alone. Till moves with her to the middle of nowhere, staying down the road because she’s not allowed in the “sheepwagon” Fuller inhabits herself. Till drives Fuller to a grueling-sounding silent retreat in a former mental institution in Canada. She feeds her, waters her, stands between her and self-harm. She is certainly the hero of this book.
There are plenty of non-heroes, as well. As usual, in times of tragedy, people say the darndest things, and Fuller has not forgotten them: “‘You will never get over it,’ a woman of my acquaintance assured me quite casually, as if pointing out to someone pinned under a bulldozer: Oh, that won’t budge in this lifetime.” Fuller’s reply, “thank you,” hid her real thoughts: “I’m not ready to eschew my pain, wrap myself in prayer flags, and fade out with the bells. I am merely in the early learning stages of grieving my only possible son.”
As Fuller reminds us, she is far from alone, but “one of millions of mothers to have lost a child every year.” Then she asks: “If none of us suffered, where would we be? Without wise women is where; suffering brings wisdom. So, a gift, this suffering, a promissory note for sagacity.” With “Fi,” I would call the note paid in full, though — Fuller being Fuller — I won’t be surprised if there are future installments.
Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”
