This is about moving through grief to find some peace- and Fowler does it by traveling, It's a tribute as well to her fiancé Sean, who tragically died too young. It''s hard to review memoirs because it feels judgey but this one is beautifully written and thoughtful.

This book stands as such a beautiful and moving memorial, one that I could not quit reading. I felt everything the author put into the pages so profoundly - it truly touched me.

This memoir haunts me, as well as it would anyone. The terrifying and shocking death of her husband leaves her without his family. She gets away to travel, hoping to heal herself from the devastating losses, but finds the "ghost" of her husband is always with her. Sometimes even when you try to escape the loss and grief, it is impossible.

It broke my heart. I'm probably supposed to write about how well-written and thoughtful it is but all I can think is that I never want that to happen to me.

Traveling with Ghosts: A memoir by Shannon Leone Fowler

“The chilly fingers of grief touch us in a way that mark us forever” Shannon Leone Fowler writes early on in this memoir of her lost fiancé. There is no easy way to deal with loss and grief. Each mourns in their own way, and the journey is different for all those who find themselves on that road. The length of time too, differs, and there are no ready answers for that either.

In Traveling with Ghosts: A memoir Fowler takes us through the journey she took in mourning her fiancé, Sean, who dies of a box jellyfish sting in Thailand in 2002. At the time she was a twenty-eight marine biologist from the US, backpacking with Sean, who was from Australian. Her description of the time after he dies are horrific, the Thai police are trying to make out the death was because of drunk drowning, and while mired in her shock she maintains it certainly wasn’t. She’s helped in these first few days by a group of Israeli women, whose names she doesn’t know, but who hold her up metaphorically and literally. It’s a scenario few of us want to imagine.

After his death and funeral in Australia, mired in grief, Fowler decides to honour her relationship and to find healing through travelling. She and Sean met and bonded in Barcelona while travelling, and Fowler, groping in the dark for answers and healing starts out by going through Eastern Europe. Interspersed through these journeys – to Poland, where she visits Auschwitz, to Bosnia and Romania – are her memories of Sean and their travels through places such as China. The narrative weaves between the past and her current healing journey, while also presenting facts about Fowler’s past, her deciding to be a marine biologist – a cruel irony in itself as the sea is what took her fiancé.

Her description of her work as a marine biologist is best described in this fascinating passage about her work with an octopus and demonstrates Fowler’s skilled writing: “I thought back to the summer I’d spent at the Bodega Bay Marine Lab. Ripley, a giant Pacific octopus, had been brought into the lab after being caught in a crab trap. She weighed over forty pounds, had an arm span of almost fifteen feet, and was considerably stronger than I was. As I’d studied Ripley’s learning behavior that summer, she began to recognize me. When I walked into the room, she would crawl up to the trapdoor at the top of her huge tank and reach out a tentacle, her suckers sticking and gripping and tasting the length of my arm. In turn, I began to recognize her moods and corresponding colors and textures. Her skin turned white and rippled when she was frightened, red and spiky when she was angry or frustrated, and she flushed a deep smooth purple when she was content, usually after a meal. I used to watch what I swore was dreaming— wedged into a corner with her eyes narrowed into slits, her eight arms piled into lose coils around her body as she pulsed from pink to camouflage to brown.”

Mired in her sadness she spends days alone, being a tourist, travelling on the local buses, eating at local restaurants, absorbing what the countries have to offer, moving inexorably toward some conclusion. She travels to Israel to meet the two women who helped her after the accident in Thailand and finds the warmth of her friends, and solace. They take her to the tank museum at Yad La-Shiryon. Her descriptions of the Tower of Tears testify to her lyrical writing: “The tower in the old fort had been converted to a Tower of Tears. The inside of the tower was lined with metal from damaged and war-torn tanks, the soldered sheets rusting and riddled with bullet holes. Water trickled down these walls and collected in a spring below a glass floor at the base. I’d gotten so used to going to museums by myself in Eastern Europe, it felt almost strange to share the experience with people I knew. It felt even stranger that they each understood what it was like to suddenly lose someone. The four of us stood together in the tower, silent and still as the drops ran down the battered steel of the walls. We thought of the different people we loved who had died far too young.” She goes on to Barcelona, where she and Sean first met: “It was where we’d had our first kiss, and although I didn’t tell him until weeks later in Salamanca, it was in Barcelona where I first began to fall in love with him.”

Through it all the memories and grief persist: “I certainly didn’t feel strong. I was frantic and scared and barely getting out of bed in the morning. And although I knew it would never have been a conscious decision, it felt as if my friends were choosing not to see how damaged I was.” And, a telling paragraph, an experience common to those who have suffered grief: “I felt like I’d lost the ability to interpret social situations. I was always so close to tears, it made it hard to guess the intentions of other people. It would be years before I stopped flinching in everyday conversations.”

This is a vivid, compelling story – both memoir and travel writing – the language is strong, yet lyrical. A book of memories, a book of places and a book of those people who hold our hands once the necessary silence and mourning has run its course: “This is what Israel and its rules for sitting shiva taught me— that as much as grief needs solitude, memories need to be shared and mourning needs to be recognized. Grief needs time and space, but it also needs company.”

I don't usually give memoirs a star rating because they are so personal in their respective journeys but I had to with this one as I thought it was beautifully written.

It originally caught my eye, as it was likened to Cheryl Strayed's - Wild, which is one of my favourite books and it certainly lives up to expectations. Traveling With Ghosts tells us of Shannon's grief, which is so very palpable and trying to come to terms with the unexpected death of fiancé Sean, in Thailand from the deadly Box Jellyfish. A situation that they had no inkling of the danger and which the authorities refused to admit to.
As their relationship was forged through travelling, unable to settle she decides to travel solo to work through her grief. Told in three time periods, her and Sean's relationship and travels prior to his death, the time pertaining to Sean's death and then her solo travel in the months after, the going to and fro between each period was easy to follow. As you keep reading, things in their relationship are explained and we come to know Sean as a person. One thing that struck me, was how lucky Shannon was to be taken care of by the two Israeli girls Anat and Talia, at the time of Sean's death in Thailand. It wasn't until later in the book that their actions were explained and I got quite emotional. I really found Shannon's travels by herself engrossing, not depressing but not sugar coated either, which I think some travel based memoirs are. A lot of places she visits have been torn by war or poverty but there is always hope.

A very moving book that will that will stay with me for a long time.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for a copy to read and review.