EVERYTHING CHANGES EVERYTHING

After losing her husband and daughter in the same year, an author goes hiking in search of answers.

About two weeks into hiking the Camino Francés, the famous pilgrimage route from France to Spain, author Kessler (Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home, 2022) and her fellow travelers encounter a group of nuns who wonder why they’re making the grueling, 500-mile journey. Kessler’s answer: “I need to do something to separate the life I’ve been living from the life that is now in front of me…And it needed to be something big.” Not long before embarking on the hike, the author’s husband of 30 years, Tom, became ill and ended his own life using a medical kit legalized decades earlier in Oregon, where they lived. Eight months later, the author’s daughter, Lizzie, died of an overdose of methamphetamine laced with fentanyl, a symptom of an addiction the author believes began when her daughter entered a physically abusive relationship. To make sense of these enormous losses, the author committed to hiking the Camino. Kessler writes, “What I told myself was that I needed something hard to do that I chose to do instead of something hard to do that came out of nowhere and gobsmacked me.” Although the journey might not fully heal the author, it does teach her that grief is not something to overcome so much as something she must learn to live with for the rest of her life. “Grief is a new organ that has taken up residency in the body,” she writes. “Sometimes it causes discomfort like an upset stomach. Sometimes it is a dull ache like a bum knee…You feel its weight. I will always feel its weight.”

A well-paced and affecting account of coping with great loss.