Year of Plenty:
A Family’s Season of Grief

 
Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief
By B.J. Hollars
University of Wisconsin Press | 2024 | 272 pages
 

When Canada geese perform their mating call, the male sings one part and the female the other, and after one dies, the survivor sings both halves to keep the song alive. This last bit is folklore that carries poetic truth, because it speaks to the duality of grief. After death, our loved ones are here in our hearts, yet they are not here, and we yearn to be made whole again. In his tender memoir, Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief, B.J. Hollars writes about the dying of his father-in-law, Steve, and how the family learns to navigate between the world where Steve is here now and the one rapidly approaching, where he is not.

Year of Plenty opens in November 2020, eight months into the pandemic. Hollars and his wife, Meredith, and their three young children live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, but they grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where their parents still live. Meredith’s mother—Steve’s wife—had died five years before. Hollars and Meredith are already juggling the competing demands of school, work, sports, appointments, and the rest, all complicated by Covid restrictions, when Steve calls to say he has stage-four lung cancer. And so begins months of treatment, hope, and hospice with many 450-mile drives back and forth between the two states. This is not a treatise on death, nor are there any dark secrets or unresolved issues. Instead, it is an invitation into a family’s daily life while mortality makes itself at home.

The slim chapters read like journal entries, interspersed with a few interviews and sprinkled with snapshots taken during this season of grief. One, right before Steve’s death in June 2021, shows the family walking like captives through an other-worldly mist. Another has Steve posing with his grandchildren on a Florida beach while the tide goes out behind them, a pointed reminder that a photograph lasts even when its subject does not. But Hollars does not push it. When six-year-old Ellie sees her grandmother in person after four months of screen visits, they run towards one another “as if performing a scene from 1940s cinema,” and Hollars pockets his phone. “I capture nothing. Instead, I live a little.”

Hollars often recounts quotidian exchanges that carry the weight of existential questions. When he and Ellie get take-out for the extended family during the death vigil, they place their order and step back. “‘Now what?’ Ellie asks. ‘Now, we wait,’ I say.” Later in the summer, after Steve is gone, Hollars watches a film in the backyard with a friend (remember, the pandemic). “The movie ends with a twist I never see coming and one I don’t understand.” His friend asks what he thought. “‘Wild,’ I say. ‘Just wild.’” Other conversations go right to the heart of the matter. Millie, who was a baby in the beginning, is three when the book wraps up. “What death is?” she asks him. What, indeed? Back when Hollars was a camp counselor for ten-year-old cancer survivors, one of the boys said, “Not a lot of people really know what it feels like to be dying…. It’s kind of like being alive, only you notice things.” Hollars and Ellie keep finding Titleist 3 golf balls in their travels, even in the water while kayaking. Later we find out that the first he ever found, years before, was his grandfather’s. “I held in my hand what he once held in his hand.”

And yet, their lives are hardly all melancholy reflection. When they discover that their dog, Leo, loves to howl to the harmonica, “our mellifluous mutt belts out a tune, and somehow, we teeter toward rapture.” They continue to do the things young families do, going on adventures both near and far, often camping. “This is our year of plenty. Our year of such abundance, both good and bad, that we’re crushed beneath its weight.” But mostly they travel to Fort Wayne to see Steve, and while there, they visit Hollars’ parents, often staying with them in the home built by his grandparents. “That my children are the third generation of firefly catchers in this backyard seems incomprehensible.” But there are hardly any fireflies compared to what there were in his childhood, and they manage to catch and release only two. More loss in a changing world.

A grieving brain is very busy, often causing hypersensitivity and irritability, and the family is not immune to either after Steve dies. Hollars’ parents are still hale and hearty, which creates some unsettled emotions. “One person can call their dad and the other can’t—there’s nothing equal about that,” he writes. He also questions the imbalance inherent in writing a memoir based on what is mostly Meredith’s loss. “Is writing a book an act of love or the opposite of listening?” he asks. There are flare-ups between Hollars and Meredith, with hurt feelings compounding their sorrow. They work to repair the damage, although my heart sank when Hollars buys helium balloons—a lethal danger to wildlife—for Meredith by way of an apology.

Death unmakes all families in the end, but it can also open up the possibility of new configurations. In their postmortem adjustment, the family pushes against the walls of their small house. Ellie folds herself into a milk crate in her closet to attend a virtual class with her tablet, and Hollars knows something has to give. When they start to eye a bigger home a few blocks away, Hollars’ mother calls with a proposal to buy their old one. They want to be closer to their grandchildren. “‘I’m tired,’ she says, ‘of missing everything.’” So with a shuffling of real estate documents, his parents move from Indiana to Wisconsin, making two worlds into one. “My parents are choosing to leave the place they love in favor of the people they love.” The singers come and go, but the song plays on.
 

Read “Safely Ashore,” an excerpt of Year of Plenty by B.J. Hollars.