FI: A memoir, by Alexandra Fuller
Alexandra Fuller learned the art of denial from her gloriously dysfunctional parents. “Mum is a bit wobbly,” Dad explained, that dangerous British habit of underestimating the seriousness of a given situation until you eat the last sled dog and write your last diary entries.”
In “Fi,” her latest memoir (she has published four, including “Don't Go to the Dogs Tonight,” a 2002 Times Notable Book), Fuller writes, “It was normal for people in our circles to prefer to their animals over their children, and to die young—of gin, guns, and other accidents of the soul. Certainly no one we knew survived his hips or knees; we grew up expecting a short, colorful life.”
An example of the family's stoicism, Fuller experienced her toddler sister's funeral “without expressions of real emotion.”
She warns the reader that things will get much worse after this, 'the body count'. It does.
Her mother tried to commit suicide – “all pills, brandishing a gun; everyone was talking about it” – and then her grandmother tried it too. But, Fuller writes, “the less said, the better my mother told us, a phrase we often heard as children: under the table, under the carpet, under wrappers.”
In “Fi,” Fuller leaves nothing under the table, under the rug, or under the wrappers. Even if things get much worse, when her beloved son Fi (pronounced Fee) is also included in the death toll.
There was no warning or explanation. There had been seizures, but Fi had been declared fine. He was 21.
Of course, a parent is biased, but we trust Fuller when she's excited about Fi. “He was So lives his whole life, for years. He was “smart, hilarious, serious, self-aware.”
Fuller does not spare the reader the moment when she had to deal with Fi's death. While her two daughters cried outside, she sat by his body. “Our perfect son is dead; the perfect son is dead; a perfect son is dead,” she writes.
She also does not spare us the next step: “The sound of an incinerator, it is a roar. He came out with his head. He went in feet first. And then the doors closed.”
Fuller withers away, loses weight and follows her journey through her grief. Early on she goes camping at a mountain lake. She lives for a while in a sheep wagon – 5 meters long and 2.5 meters wide, intended for shepherds who guard their flocks. There she meditates and writes: “It is becoming increasingly difficult to leave my 'deep mountain sorrow' behind.”
Fuller releases her son's ashes into a stream. “I'll let you go,” I said to Fi. “Wherever you are needed, go there.” She promises to find him.
Back at her apartment, Fuller goes into a tailspin: “People were now telling me to get over it. They insisted that my girls needed me. Fi would have wanted me to be happy, they said, the same people who told me about the death of their own child would have killed them.
She then visits a “bereavement shelter” in New Mexico to work with a body worker. “Either you have to fix me, or I have to die here,” she tells the woman. There's yoga and breathwork and writing letters and then burning them.
Fuller looks elsewhere for answers, but finds that few are to be found when a parent loses a child. Perhaps one answer: time. Fuller's friend Cait said: “I felt like my brain was being hijacked for about a year after Ollie died.”
“Are you over it now?” asked Fuller.
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 puts post-its on a mirror, a door and above the kettle: 'We'll fix it.'
She writes: 'How did I know we would make it? Don't know; I did not know. But people do.”
The last thing you expect to do when reading a book about a dying child is to laugh. When you read “Fi,” you do – or, like Fuller, “laugh-cry,” like the emoji. The humor in this memoir is heartbreaking. It's part of what saves Fuller, and it saves the reader as we move through the stages of her loss and grief toward a kind of acceptance that life will never be the same as it was.
Fuller is astute and perceptive. She is a sublime writer. In the hands of another memoirist, Fi's story might be unbearably sad, but this book is a spellbinding celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother's love, and her resilience. It will help others survive loss – survive life.
FI: A memoir | By Alexandra Fuller | Bush | 272 pages | $28
