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"On a group hiking trip in the Buscegi Mountains of Romania in 2007, John and Katie Evans were unaware they'd be passing through an active brown bear habitat. Encountering a bear that night after dusk, Katie is separated from the group and trapped by thebear. Hearing her screams as the animal attacked her, John was unable to distract the bear and watched helplessly from a distance as it slowly crushed his wife to death. Katie was thirty years old. "Young Widower" is John Evans's memoir not just of one day, but of six years spent with a wife he loved, and the days and months that followed the tragedy. A widower at age twenty-nine, John finds himself living with Katie's family in the year after her death, discovering the cyclical nature of grief, the guilt of surviving, and what it means to lose a marriage. His desire to remember Katie is many things: devoted, empathic, needy, lonely, self-important, critical, nostalgic; he is a young widower negotiating a world that understands elderly widows, but doesn't know what to do with an angst-ridden young man worried about continuing to live without his wife for a very long time. Unflinching and unsentimental, "Young Widower" is a heartbreaking witness of living daily with grief, a rumination on the fragility ofthe human experience"--
List of contents
Acknowledgments
How Lives Go On
There Are No Words
Losing the Marriage
Young Americans
The Legend of a Life
Flush
The Number Line
The Circle Game
Erasing the Room
Cognitive Bandwidth
Tying the Knot
Rehearsals for Departure
Alone to Tell Thee
About the author
John W. Evans, a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, teaches creative writing at Stanford. His award-winning work appears in
Slate, the
Missouri Review,
ZYZZYVA, and the
Rumpus.
