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WORK TITLE: Traveling with Ghosts
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://shannonleonefowler.com/
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Shannon-Leone-Fowler/497732839
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1975; daughter of Karen Joy Fowler; children: three.
EDUCATION:University of California Santa Cruz , Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Marine biologist, writer. Has taught marine ecology in the Bahamas and Galapagos; leader of university course in killer whales, San Juan Islands; marine mammal biologist on ships in the Arctic and Antarctic; taught graduate students field techniques; National Public Radio, Washington, DC, former science writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and marine biologist Shannon Leone Fowler earned her doctorate on Australian sea lions and has worked in marine ecology and as a marine biologist in areas including the Bahamas, Galapagos, San Juan Islands, the Arctic, and Antarctica. She “saw the ocean as a place of beauty and wonder,” as Peggy Townsend noted in the online University of California Santa Cruz Newscenter. That, however, changed one day in 2002 when she and her Australian fiancé, Sean, were in the water near Ko Pha Ngan island in Thailand and he died from the sting of a deadly box jellyfish. This turned Fowler’s life upside down and she spent the next several years trying to come to terms with her loss and with her new view of the dangers of the ocean. She recounts this journey in her 2017 work, Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir, “part travelogue and part love story, [as well as] an examination of the intensity of loss and the way we grieve,” according to Townsend. “I still miss him every day,” Fowler told Townsend. “I still wonder what we would have had together and, even if our relationship hadn’t survived, what he would be doing. … I think I will always love him..” The single mother of three children, Fowler now lives in London and works as a writer.
Fowler was in Australian in 2002 working in her doctorate, studying the diving habits of Australian seal lion pups. She had earlier in her world travels met a young Australian man, Sean, and now they had just gotten engaged. She was also pregnant with their child. They decided to celebrate their engagement with a trip to Thailand. It was on the afternoon of August 9, 2002, the that tragedy struck. Holding one another in the warm ocean water, Fowler felt something brush against her thigh, and then Sean suddenly flinched and ran through the water toward the beach, complaining that his head was heavy and he had trouble breathing. He told Fowler to get help and she ran to the bar at the tourist camp where they were lodging to get help.
“A number of people followed me from the bar and when we reached Sean he had no pulse,” Fowler writes in her memoir. “A young female backpacker began compressing his chest, her slender white hands folded on top of each other. A thin Israeli with a goatee instructed her in English, criticising her counting. I waited for a reaction, a Hollywood-esque splutter and cough as Sean came round and gasped for air. I would tell him how much he’d scared me. I still thought someone could save him. Save us.” Finally someone brought a truck to transport Sean to the local clinic with Fowler providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the way. But Sean was already dead by the time they reached the clinic.
Two young Israeli women who accompanied Fowler helped her through the next difficult days, offering solace and helping to see her through the Thai bureaucracy, and also being there for her when she miscarried several days after Sean’s death. Fowler later flew to Australia with his body, reunited with his parents, but soon she felt out of place in Australia and saw that her presence was actually causing pain for Sean’s family. Back in California, however, things were not much better, with her parents worried for her and her friends upset at her grief. She was unable to continue her studies of the ocean, feeling betrayed by it. Finally Fowler decided to hit the road, traveling by backpack through Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Bulgaria, and visiting the two women who helped her in Israel. Fowler also flashes back in her short chapters to summers she spent as a child with her oceanographer grandfather, as well as to her earlier travels in Europe, Australian, and China. “As the book moves backward and forward in time, [Fowler] creates a warm and vivid portrait of Sean, a generous, spirited, and easygoing young man,” noted Barbara Spindel in the Christian Science Monitor. “Given that this is partly a travel memoir, Fowler also delivers keen insights on the countries she visits.” Finally, Fowler began to work through her grief, though it took eight months before she could even touch the sea once again. The author also writes about the deadly box jellyfish and the Thai response to its increasing presence because of climate change. Fearful of scaring off tourists, Thailand makes rare warnings of the animals’ presence and under-reports deaths caused by it.
Spindel termed Traveling with Ghosts a “lovely debut,” further commenting, “Fowler tells this wrenching story with grace and fortitude.” Similarly, USA Today contributor Sharon Peters noted: “[Fowler’s] story — rich, unblinking and adroitly told — is one of strength, of getting past but not getting over. Few would choose the approach Fowler took to kick-start healing. But hers is a thought-provoking journey that she generously shares.” Further praise came from BookPage writer Priscilla Kipp, who observed: “Grief, grit, love, loss, world travel and the deadly sting of a box jellyfish all have a place in Shannon Leone Fowler’s intensely personal and appealing memoir, Traveling with Ghosts.” Kipp went on to call this an “unforgettable read.” Booklist reviewer Kathy Sexton felt this work will “appeal to globetrotters and readers of hopeful stories chronicling grief and recovery,” while a Kirkus Reviews critic dubbed it a “courageous and finely crafted account soaked in tears of love and loss.”
For a Publishers Weekly contributor, Traveling with Ghosts is a “nicely written and informative journey on the path to healing.” Writing in the Washington Times Online, Martin Rubin also had a high assessment, observing: “It is a measure of Ms. Fowler’s great achievement in life and on the pages of her memoir that, while never minimizing the profound pain of her loss, she managed not only to survive but to say convincingly that ‘I know how lucky I have been.'” Similarly, On Art and Aesthetics Website writer Tulika Bahadur commented: “Simple, honest and unsentimental, Traveling With Ghosts will be appreciated by those who have seen loved ones go in untimely deaths. It will also be a great read for those interested in world cultures.” London Guardian Online reviewer Viv Groskop also offered a positive assessment, terming the book “gloriously rendered, beautifully written, but utterly devastating.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Fowler, Shannon Leone, Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2016, Kathy Sexton, review of Traveling with Ghosts, p. 10.
BookPage, March, 2017, Priscilla Kipp, review of Traveling with Ghosts, p. 22.
Christian Science Monitor, February 22, 2017, Barbara Spindel, review of Traveling with Ghosts.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of Traveling with Ghosts.
Publishers Weekly, November 28, 2016, review of Traveling with Ghosts, p. 61.
USA Today, July 20, 2017, Sharon Peters, “After Fiancé’s Death, a Writer Travels with ‘Ghosts’,” p. 5D.
ONLINE
Daily Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ (February 18, 2017) Shannon Leone Fowler, “Real Lives: The Deadly Sting That Destroyed Our Paradise.”
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 2, 2017), Viv Groskop, review of Traveling With Ghosts.
On Art and Aesthetics, https://onartandaesthetics.com/ (March 7, 2017), Tulika Bahadur, review of Traveling with Ghosts.
Shannon Leone Fowler Website, https://shannonleonefowler.com/ (July 24, 2017).
Simon & Schuster Website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (July 24, 2017), “Shannon Leone Fowler.”
University of California Santa Cruz Newscenter, https://news.ucsc.edu/ (February 21, 2017). Peggy Townsend, “Exploring the Dark Waters of Grief.”
Washington Times Online, http://www.washingtontimes.com/ (April 4, 2017), Martin Rubin, review of Traveling with Ghosts.*
Shannon Leone Fowler
Shannon Leone Fowler is a marine biologist, writer, and single mother of three young children. Since her doctorate on Australian sea lions, she’s taught marine ecology in the Bahamas and Galápagos, led a university course on killer whales in the San Juan islands, spent a number of seasons as the marine mammal biologist on board ships in both the Arctic and Antarctic, taught graduate students field techniques while studying Weddell seals on the Ross Ice Shelf, and worked as a science writer at National Public Radio in Washington, DC. Originally from California, she currently lives in London. Traveling with Ghosts is her first book.
About Shannon
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Shannon Leone Fowler is a writer, marine biologist, and single mother of three young children. Since her doctorate on Australian sea lions, she’s taught marine ecology in the Bahamas and Galápagos, led a university course on killer whales in the San Juan Islands, spent seasons as the marine mammal biologist on board ships in both the Arctic and Antarctic, taught graduate students field techniques while studying Weddell seals on the Ross Ice Shelf, and worked as a science writer at National Public Radio in Washington DC. Originally from California, she currently lives in London. Traveling with Ghosts is her first book.
QUOTE:
saw the ocean as a place of beauty and wonder.
I still miss him every day,” she said. “I still wonder what we would have had together and, even if our relationship hadn’t survived, what he would be doing.
Exploring the dark waters of grief
Alumna Shannon Fowler, whose life changed in an instant with the tragic death of her fiancé, finds acceptance of death and grief—and has rediscovered her love of the ocean
February 21, 2017
By Peggy Townsend
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Alumna Shannon Fowler's new memoir, Traveling with Ghosts, recalls her attempts to come to terms with loss and guilt.
For the first 28 years of her life, and as a Ph.D. student in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, Shannon Leone Fowler saw the ocean as a place of beauty and wonder.
That changed on the afternoon of Aug. 9, 2002.
That day, she and her then-fiancé, a 25-year-old Australian named Sean, were wrapped in a romantic embrace in the water off Ko Pha Ngan island in Thailand when she felt something brush against her thigh and then Sean drop her from his arms.
Minutes later, Sean was dead on the beach, the victim of one of the world’s most venomous creatures—a box jellyfish—and Fowler’s life was upside down.
What happened over the next months, including a miscarriage and a lonely trek through the war-torn countries of Eastern Europe as Fowler attempted to come to terms with loss and guilt, is the subject of a new memoir titled Traveling with Ghosts, which Booklist compared to Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Wild.
Tuesday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m. Fowler will make an appearance at Bookshop Santa Cruz, to read from and discuss her book, including her eventual return to the ocean she loved.
Fowler, 42, lives in London now, the single mother of three children age 2 to 6. But in 2002 she was a world traveler who was living on Kangaroo Island off the coast of Australia, where, under the direction of Dan Costa, UC Santa Cruz professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, she was doing research on the diving habits of Australian sea lion pups.
She and Sean had just gotten engaged and decided to celebrate with a trip to Thailand when he crossed paths with the jellyfish, a fast-swimming invertebrate with deadly tentacles that reach almost 10 feet in length and whose populations and territories are increasing around the world.
Fowler, who a few days after Sean’s death would miscarry their child, was wracked with grief and got on a plane for Eastern Europe, a place that was about as far away from home and the sunny beaches of Thailand as she could get.
“I was 28 when Sean died, and everyone was getting married and getting pregnant and buying houses, and everyone was in this amazing place in life and I had a dead fiancé and a miscarriage,” Fowler recounted during a phone interview from her home in southwest London. “I found it hard to be surrounded by that.”
She also found there was little room for grief in American or Australian culture. Acquaintances wouldn’t look her in the eye. Neighbors would cross the street to avoid talking to her. Worst of all were the people who spouted platitudes about it being Sean’s time or that good would come from tragedy.
Wandering alone through war-ravaged countries like Bosnia, Poland, and Israel, Fowler would not only discover the kindness of strangers but also an acceptance of death and of grief, a way to live with horrific events instead of turning away from them. She kept detailed journals from that time.
At the encouragement of friends and family—her mom is the writer Karen Joy Fowler—and after getting her Ph.D. in 2005 and working in Antarctica for scientific and adventure operations for several seasons, Fowler began writing.
The result is part travelogue and part love story, but it is also an examination of the intensity of loss and the way we grieve.
“I’ll see a movie or a TV show or read a book where someone loses someone they love and two scenes later they are dating and are strong and have learned life lessons,” Fowler said. “Popular culture fast-forwards through what I wanted to focus on in my book … and that is the intense, day-after-day grief where you’re just trying to put one foot in front of the other. Not learning life lessons.”
Now raising her children and working as a writer, Fowler has rediscovered her love of the ocean, although, she said, it is tinted with a darkness that wasn’t there before. She also said that, even though it has been 14 years since his death, she still thinks about Sean.
“I still miss him every day,” she said. “I still wonder what we would have had together and, even if our relationship hadn’t survived, what he would be doing.
“I think,” she said, “I will always love him.”
QUOTE:
A number of people followed me from the bar and when we reached Sean he had no pulse. A young female backpacker began compressing his chest, her slender white hands folded on top of each other. A thin Israeli with a goatee instructed her in English, criticising her counting. I waited for a reaction, a Hollywood-esque splutter and cough as Sean came round and gasped for air. I would tell him how much he’d scared me. I still thought someone could save him. Save us.
eal lives: The deadly sting that destroyed our paradise
By SHANNON LEONE FOWLER
PUBLISHED: 19:03 EDT, 18 February 2017 | UPDATED: 21:19 EDT, 18 February 2017
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SHANNON LEONE FOWLER was travelling in Thailand with her fiancé Sean when he was stung by a box jellyfish. She describes the tragic events of that day and their traumatic aftermath
Sunrise Beach, Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand, where 25-year-old Sean was stung +6
Sean and Shannon, 28, in China, 2002 +6
Sunrise Beach, Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand, where 25-year-old Sean was stung, and Sean and Shannon, 28, in China, 2002
We were holding hands, walking back to our cabana on Sunrise Beach. The tall palms lining the edge of the shore were motionless; the sea was calm. Darkness was starting to fall, though it was still warm and sticky. It was like every other evening on Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand. We were planning a quick shower, then drinks and dinner. We knew we were spending too much money on food, but had decided not to worry about our finances in paradise.
Outside our cabana, Sean grinned and flashed his dimple as he put down his glasses on the porch – an invitation to wrestle. I hesitated; I knew that I had no hope of winning. But I kicked off my flip-flops and wrestled all the same, lost badly and was pinned to the ground. Soft white sand stuck to my coconut-scented skin, still oily from a massage on the beach that afternoon. I was not a good loser and threw sand at him as he disappeared inside.
I headed straight for the ocean to rinse off. Sean reappeared and made his way to the shore, but he couldn’t see where I was without his glasses. I took off my wet vest and threw it at him. He waded over to me laughing and I hugged him and circled my legs around his narrow waist.
‘You didn’t have to throw sand.’
I made excuses. ‘I was just playing…and I was losing.’
‘Yes, you were losing.’
He paused and I felt guilty for being so immature and apologised.
He held me in the waist-deep water as I wrapped my legs tighter around him. We kissed and I could taste the salt on his tongue. I felt something large and soft brush against the outside of my thigh. I yelped. Sean had always been afraid of sea creatures, particularly sharks, and asked what it was. I was studying to be a marine biologist and knew how unlikely a shark attack was, particularly in Thailand.
‘I just felt something,’ I began, and hadn’t finished the sentence when Sean flinched and dropped me, running through the darkening turquoise sea towards the beach.
His movements were urgent and awkward, his elbows held high, his fingers splayed.
‘It’s all over my legs…’ he sat down on the wet sand. I bent down in the fading light and could barely make out a faint red welt rising on his ankle.
Sean in 1999 +6
Sean in 1999
‘It’s probably a stingray.’ Whatever had bumped me in the water felt substantial. Other than the small welt, I couldn’t see any marks on his legs. I’d been with people stung by stingrays before and seen how excruciating it could be. So I wasn’t surprised when Sean said, ‘My head feels heavy. I’m having trouble breathing. Go get help.’
‘Come with me,’ I said as I looked at him sitting at the water’s edge.
‘I can’t.’ Sean started to sink down on to his elbows in the sand. ‘The key is in your shoe.’ It was the last thing he said as I turned to go.
There was a bar several hundred feet away, but I was topless. As we were right in front of our cabana I ran inside, peeled off my wet shorts and threw on a thin purple sundress. I didn’t realise Sean was dying. By the time I ran back out he had collapsed face-first on to the sand. I ran to him but it was difficult to turn him over. There was a brief sound of an intake of air, which was reassuring because I thought he hadn’t been able to breathe with his face in the sand.
I rushed to the bar, which was crowded with tourists. ‘My boyfriend’s been stung. He’s having trouble breathing.’ I was having trouble breathing myself.
A number of people followed me from the bar and when we reached Sean he had no pulse. A young female backpacker began compressing his chest, her slender white hands folded on top of each other. A thin Israeli with a goatee instructed her in English, criticising her counting. I waited for a reaction, a Hollywood-esque splutter and cough as Sean came round and gasped for air. I would tell him how much he’d scared me. I still thought someone could save him. Save us.
Sean and Shannon on the backpacker’s trail at Huashan, 2002 +6
Sean and Shannon on the backpacker’s trail at Zhangjiajie in China, 2002 +6
Sean and Shannon on the backpacker’s trail at Huashan and Zhangjiajie in China, 2002
We’d been doing CPR for a few minutes when I realised how totally alone I was. I was the only person on the beach this was happening to. Everyone else was just watching.
‘Can we please get an ambulance?’ It didn’t occur to me that Ko Pha Ngan wouldn’t have one.
A truck was reversed down to the beach and Sean was moved into the back. With his head in my lap I continued mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. No one said a word as we jolted along a dirt road towards the Bandon International Clinic at Haad Rin. As I bent my mouth to Sean’s and forced my breath into his lungs, the Israeli who’d criticised the chest compression counts on the beach looked away.
At the clinic two men carried Sean through the tiny waiting room to a bed against the far wall. ‘Has he taken any drugs?’ a round-faced Chinese doctor asked from behind thick glasses. ‘Has he been drinking?’
We watched through open white curtains as the doctor leaned into Sean’s chest. A nurse pushed tubes down his throat. I paced. I shook.
I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands. I watched as a thick needle was plunged into his chest. There was hardly any medical equipment and certainly no antivenom. There appeared to be nothing there that could save Sean.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said as he came towards me and I collapsed, sobbing, on to the floor. ‘There was nothing I could do. He was already dead when he got here.’
Sean lay staring at the ceiling. I stood next to him, crying, one hand on the side of his face, the other on his chest. ‘I am so sorry, I didn’t know you were dying.’ I laid my head on his chest, my face in the crook of his neck as I had done so many times before. ‘I am so sorry…I love you.’ His only piece of jewellery was a wide silver ring engraved with pictures and figures. I slid the ring off his finger and felt the cold weight of it in my palm. He had often told me to remind him to put his ring back on after showering. He’d always been afraid of leaving it behind.
I kissed Sean once more, his ring heavy in my fist, before walking out of the clinic. But the Chinese doctor immediately ushered me back in and sat me down at a desk. Across the small space of the room, I could almost reach out and touch Sean’s curled fingers. The doctor handed me a pen and placed a piece of paper in front of me. ‘Please sign the death certificate.’ He pointed to a line near the bottom of the document. The words were in Thai. It hardly seemed to matter. I looked at Sean’s half-naked body and wanted to climb up on to the bed and curl myself around him.
One of the two Israeli girls who had come with me from the beach walked into the room with her friend close behind. ‘This needs to be translated; she’s not signing until it is.’
I listened to their conversation as if it didn’t involve me, detached and staring at Sean. Wishing his eyes would stay shut. Wishing he were dressed. Wishing they would leave us alone. ‘She can have it translated tomorrow after she signs.’
‘She’s not signing something in Thai. What’s the cause of death?’ The two girls were looking over his shoulder at the certificate.
‘Drunk drowning.’
I turned from Sean. The doctor’s face was calm, his jaw set.
‘But I told you that he wasn’t drunk. I told you he didn’t drown. He was stung.’
The girls agreed. They had been on the beach and pointed to Sean’s exposed legs. Thin reddish-purple lines were wrapped over and over around his calves. A delicate tangle of inflamed knots twisted from his ankles to his thighs. The welts seemed to be swelling and darkening. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the rising marks. It hadn’t been a stingray.
The doctor sighed and adjusted his glasses. ‘He must have had an allergic reaction to a jellyfish then; he was just unlucky.’ He crossed out a short jumble of characters with a single thin line. Then he scribbled a long string of swirls, curves and scratches next to it.
After I signed we followed the doctor out through the curtains. The receptionist looked up from her desk. ‘How are you going to pay? Cash?’
* * * * *
For two months it had just been the two of us. Even after Sean’s death it was still just the two of us, me and his body on the island of Ko Pha Ngan, and then on to Bangkok, before finally flying his coffin home to Melbourne.
The customs doors parted and my chest tightened when I saw the faces of Sean’s parents. I stepped towards them unsteadily and hugged his father first and then his mother. It was the first time I had hugged either of them. His mother and I couldn’t stop shaking.
At first I was relieved to be able to share the burden. I’d all but stopped eating and sleeping and was close to collapse. I was grateful his father had organised the funeral.
But I missed Sean and it wasn’t long before I missed the heavy pull of responsibility for his dead body. His body had been mine and mine completely. Once his parents took over I ached to have that ownership of what was left of him again.
My parents flew in from California and hovered at the edges, trying not to intrude on the heartbreak. I appreciated that they had come, but I preferred the company of those who had been closest to Sean. Yet I didn’t really belong with his family and friends either. I wasn’t from Melbourne.
The couple with Shannon’s parents Karen and Hugh in California, 2002 +6
The couple with Shannon’s parents Karen and Hugh in California, 2002
I wasn’t even Australian. I hadn’t grown up with him or known him for as long as they had. We hadn’t had the chance to get married.
HOW DEADLY ARE BOX JELLYFISH?
In Thailand I was told over and over again that Sean was the first person to die in decades from a jellyfish sting and the locals on Ko Pha Ngan had never heard of such deaths. I’d thought Sean was allergic and incredibly unlucky until I discovered that a 23-year-old woman was stung on the same island and died a day after him.
The box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri: the world’s most venomous animal
The box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri: the world’s most venomous animal
Most jellyfish stings are not deadly to humans, but the stings of a box jellyfish can be lethal. On Sunrise Beach there were no warning notices, nor local talk of box jellyfish. Yet there have been deaths, and not only in Thailand. ‘People are getting stung and killed all over the tropics,’ according to scientist and box jellyfish expert Jamie Seymour in an article in New Scientist.
These people died from the sting of a box jellyfish:
December 1995 Two people, Langkawi, Malaysia.
May 1996 Two teenagers in the same location.
October 1999 A 26-year-old British tourist, Ko Samui, Thailand.
April 2008 An 11-year-old Swedish girl, Ko Lanta, Thailand.
February and November 2010 Two Swedish women, Langkawi and Cha-Am, Malaysia, respectively.
August 2014 A five-year-old French boy, Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand.
July 2015 A 31-year-old woman from Bangkok, Ko Pha Ngan.
October 2015 A 20-year-old German woman, Ko Samui.
All of these deaths were most likely to have been caused by Chironex fleckeri, the largest species of box jellyfish and the most venomous animal in the world. Almost transparent, a single jelly has 60 tentacles measuring up to ten feet long which are covered in millions of sting cells. A victim needs only to come into contact with a few feet of tentacle to receive a deadly injection by its stingers.
The box jellyfish population appears to be expanding. Global warming, overfishing and decreasing numbers of sea turtles who eat jellyfish may all be contributing factors. There have now been fatalities in Indonesia, India, China, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Borneo, Solomon Islands, Australia and the Philippines.
Last autumn the Tourism Authority of Thailand issued its first warnings about the presence of deadly jellyfish in its waters, offering advice on treating victims: visit tatnews.org/jellyfish for further information.
On the afternoon of the funeral I walked with Sean’s family to the first pew. When I’d said I wanted to give a eulogy I was told that his brother and a mate had planned to, and they didn’t think the priest would allow three. But I’d insisted. The packed rows of the church were quiet as everyone watched and waited for me to speak. My hands shook as I pulled the microphone down to my chin.
I didn’t have any notes to hold on to but I knew what I wanted to say.
‘When my friends and family back in the US asked me what I love about Sean, I would tell them that he’s spontaneous, affectionate, funny, loyal, honest, considerate, charming and silly. And that he has the most generous heart I have ever known. As we travelled through Thailand together he’d hand out money and presents to the little kids we met. More than once the women he flirted with at the hotels where we stayed would tell me how lucky I was. And although it’s impossible to feel lucky right now when I’ve lost the person I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, have children with, and grow old with, I know that I was lucky to have loved him, and so lucky to have been loved by him.’
Later, I stepped forward to take the roses from Sean’s coffin before it was lowered into the ground.
* * * * *
I assumed I’d have a life with Sean’s family – I had an easygoing relationship with his father and Sean had said that his mother liked me. But after I left Melbourne, after I’d hugged and kissed his parents goodbye and his father had driven me to the airport, but before the grass had begun to take root on Sean’s grave, his parents stopped returning my phone calls, emails and letters.
Maybe I was too terrible a reminder. Maybe they blamed me in some way. Maybe they couldn’t help but wish it had been me instead. Maybe, even though I thought of them as family, all they could see when they looked at me was their dead son. In the end I lost Sean and the only people on earth who felt the same way about him.
The photo on the front of Sean’s memorial card had been taken at his parents’ house on Christmas Day the year before, in 2001. In the photo Sean smiles easily into the camera – his dark hair short and spiky, his eyes crinkled near the edges of his square-shaped glasses. In the original picture I was sitting next to him, my thigh pressed against his and his arm thrown around my waist. But on the memorial card, I’ve been cropped out of the frame.
I imagine, though, that I was smiling. I imagine I was thinking about spending many more Christmases just like that one.
After Sean’s death, Shannon travelled on her own around Eastern Europe to try to come to terms with her loss, and visited the two Israeli girls who had supported her when he died. She ended her tour in Barcelona, where she had met Sean four years earlier and fallen in love. Shannon is now a marine biologist, writer and single mother of three children living in London.
This is an edited extract from Traveling With Ghosts: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Shannon Leone Fowler, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on Thursday, price £14.99. To order a copy for £11.24 until 5 March, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; free p&p on orders over £15
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QUOTE:
lovely debut
Fowler tells this wrenching story with grace and fortitude.
As the book moves backward and forward in time, she creates a warm and vivid portrait of Sean, a generous, spirited, and easygoing young man
'Traveling with Ghosts' tells a true story of great tragedy, remarkable kindness
Given that this is partly a travel memoir, Fowler also delivers keen insights on the countries she visits.
Barbara Spindel
The Christian Science Monitor. (Feb. 22, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
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Byline: Barbara Spindel
It's become something of a cliche to describe a memoir as "brave." But the word attaches itself easily to Shannon Leone Fowler, a California native whose doctoral fieldwork in marine biology took her to Australia and whose passion for travel took her just about everywhere else. In 1999, while backpacking through Europe, she fell in love with an Australian named Sean; three years later, days after getting engaged, they were vacationing on a beach in Thailand when Sean, standing in placid knee-deep water holding Fowler in his arms, was stung by a box jellyfish. Just 25 years old, he died within minutes.
In her deft and lovely debut, the memoir Traveling with Ghosts, Fowler tells this wrenching story with grace and fortitude. She also tells of her unusual response: unable to return to studying the ocean she feels has betrayed her, yet reluctant to stay at home in California with her worried family and with friends discomfited by her grief, she plans a solitary, months-long winter sojourn through eastern Europe that may strike readers as the opposite of a salve. She decides to backpack through Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Bulgaria because they are cheap, cold countries where she can avoid the ocean and encounter few English-speaking tourists. Only later does she realize she's been drawn to "cultures that [understand] loss."
The book's brief chapters present sketches not just from Fowler's trip following Sean's death but from childhood summers spent with her oceanographer grandfather; her adventures throughout Europe, Australia, Morocco, and China with Sean; and her surreal week after his death, stuck on Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand battling a hostile bureaucracy until she's cleared to bring his body home to his parents in Melbourne. As the book moves backward and forward in time, she creates a warm and vivid portrait of Sean, a generous, spirited, and easygoing young man with whom she is "nauseatingly in love." She writes of her guilt - that she didn't realize he'd been mortally wounded, that he died alone while she was running for help - and her despair when his devastated family eventually stops returning her e-mails and phone calls.
Given that this is partly a travel memoir, Fowler also delivers keen insights on the countries she visits. Exploring Sarajevo as it was still recovering from the brutal siege of the 1990s, she encounters "wounded people and buildings on every corner." At a market that had been the site of two gruesome massacres, "the produce on offer seemed exhausted, the winter harvest heaped into small piles of shrunken apples, wrinkled potatoes, and weary cucumbers," she writes. But the vendors were smiling and the streets were crowded and buzzing. Sarajevo "was one of the most alive places I'd ever visited," she marvels, "like a city waking up after a long nightmare."
In the middle of her journey, Fowler takes a side trip to Israel to visit two women who, in addition to her and Sean, emerge as the book's major characters. Anat and Talia are Israelis in their early 20s who were also vacationing on Ko Pha Ngan when Sean died. When locals put Sean in the back of a pickup truck and drive to a clinic whose doctor tries unsuccessfully to revive him, the two women follow on foot. They then accompany Fowler to a temple, where together they wait through the night for someone to locate the key to a box that will remain cool enough to store Sean's body.
The next day, the women - at this point Fowler, still in shock, hasn't even asked their names - spend long hours with her at the police station, successfully standing up to an officer who wants to list Sean's cause of death as drunk drowning. It finally occurs to Fowler to ask them why they were at the clinic to begin with. "We followed you," one answers.
"From the beach?" Fowler asks. "To see if Sean was okay?"
"No," comes the reply. "To see if you were."
Fowler doesn't learn until much later that these two strangers changed their plane tickets, determined to remain on the Thai island with Fowler until she was allowed to leave, offering company, solace, and assistance with the numbing administrative tasks necessitated by death. They're the ones who break the news to her that another young tourist has died from a jellyfish sting in the days after Sean's death. ("Traveling with Ghosts" has an element of advocacy, as the Thai government and tourist industry have downplayed the risks of venomous jellyfish.)
Just as Fowler's difficult path after Sean's death yields lessons about survival and resilience, her friendship with Anat and Talia, which continues to this day, yields its own lessons, of a kindness so extraordinary that it's nearly as affecting as the tragedy at the book's center.
QUOTE:
Her story -- rich, unblinking and adroitly told -- is one of strength, of getting past but not getting over. Few would choose the approach Fowler took to kick-start healing. But hers is a thought-provoking journey that she generously shares.
After fiance's death, a writer travels with 'Ghosts'
Sharon Peters
USA Today. (July 20, 2017): Lifestyle: p05D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: Sharon Peters, Special for USA TODAY
Frolicking in the sea with her fiance on the island of Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand, Shannon Leone Fowler, California girl, marine biologist, devotee of all things ocean-related, had begun to rethink their dinner plans. She now wanted to carve out some time for lovemaking in their sweltering little room before tending to the more mundane matter of fueling their bellies.
Seconds later her sunny-tempered, blue-eyed Aussie -- an adventuresome world traveler who recently had concluded a short-term teaching contract in China -- was utterly motionless on the beach, life gushing from him as if pressed out by invisible, determined hands.
Traveling with Ghosts (Simon & Schuster, 294 pp., ***1/2 out of four) is Fowler's memoir of the hours, days and months after her beloved Sean died moments after being stung by a jellyfish, upending every plan she had for her future, leaving her alone to deal with the bureaucratic regulations of getting his body home, and trying to come to grips at age 28 with a loss so huge and unexpected.
Fowler, fiercely independent and highly competent, was completely unmoored once she had tended to the many complications of delivering Sean's body to his parents in Australia and then returning to her parents in California. There was research work awaiting her. There were old friends who wanted to help. None of it had any meaning.
And so she traveled. Alone. To Eastern Europe in the grimy grimness of fall and winter, to places where tourists were rare, the language was impenetrable and there was little comfort to be had. She'd traveled solo in remote areas often -- had, in fact, met Sean years earlier while backpacking through Spain. But this was different. She was different.
And she couldn't stand to be near the ocean any longer.
She spent long days in small towns in Hungary, shuffling through the streets, disoriented by grief. She passed Sean's birthday alone in Gyor near the Slovakian border sitting on her creaky dorm bed and drinking a toast to him with a bottle of a thick, antiseptic-tasting Hungarian digestive drink. She traveled to Slovakia and Poland, where there were long evenings in cheap bars, rarely speaking to anyone.
Fowler recorded it all in her journal. Somehow her lifelong pattern of taking note of the amusing and the quirky while traveling overrode her dark dance with despondency. She felt none of her usual joy, but it was a kind of medicine she choked down that finally made her better.
She even, eventually, made her peace with the sea.
Her various journeys -- through grief, through areas of the world few experience and through memories of adventures that made her who she was and Sean who he was -- are movingly and honestly told.
Fowler shows none of the self-aggrandizement that saturates many memoirs, and she lived a far more interesting life -- before and after Sean's death -- than do many who write about theirs.
Her story -- rich, unblinking and adroitly told -- is one of strength, of getting past but not getting over. Few would choose the approach Fowler took to kick-start healing. But hers is a thought-provoking journey that she generously shares.
CAPTION(S):
photo shannon fowler
QUOTE:
Grief, grit, love, loss, world travel and the deadly sting of a box jellyfish all have a place in Shannon Leone Fowler's
intensely personal and appealing memoir,
unforgettable read.
Traveling with Ghosts
Priscilla Kipp
BookPage.
(Mar. 2017): p22.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
TRAVELING WITH GHOSTS
By Shannon Leone Fowler
Simon & Schuster
$26, 304 pages
ISBN 9781501107795
Audio, eBook available
MEMOIR
Grief, grit, love, loss, world travel and the deadly sting of a box jellyfish all have a place in Shannon Leone Fowler's
intensely personal and appealing memoir, Traveling with Ghosts. Bring along a world map, set aside everything you
know about healing from heartbreaking loss, and have yourself an unforgettable read.
In 1999, Fowler was a 24-year-old Californian backpacker captivated by the sea, traveling, teaching scuba diving and
training to become a marine biologist when she fell in love with Australian Sean Reilly in Barcelona. After working
apart all over the world, they reunited and became engaged in China, where Reilly was teaching and Fowler was on
break from studying the endangered Australian sea lion. To celebrate their future together, they visited an island off
southeastern Thailand, Ko Pha Ngan--where there were no warnings about the box jellyfish in the waters near their
cabana. One fatal encounter changed everything.
Feeling cruelly betrayed by the sea she planned to make her life's work, newly pregnant and unhinged by grief, Fowler
headed for war-torn Eastern Europe and then Israel. Traveling alone through Poland, Hungary, Bosnia, Croatia,
Romania and Bulgaria, Fowler kept her memories close while observing how survivors coped. In Sarajevo, the shell of
their blasted National Library became a symbol of resilience. Poland, she wrote, "taught me--that real tragedies don't
need to be redeemed, they need to be remembered." In Israel, she witnessed war's carnage everywhere, while life (and
war) went on.
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Four months later, Fowler could face the sea again, but it would be another eight months before she could bring herself
to touch it. Almost 15 years later, box jellyfish warnings in Thailand are still rare and the deaths still under-reported.
But due to global warming, she warns, the most venomous marine life on the planet is spreading as water temperatures
rise.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kipp, Priscilla. "Traveling with Ghosts." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 22+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701848&it=r&asid=8a3c2bf229561e6ba8e7a0c0a77053ce.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483701848
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QUOTE:
appeal to
globetrotters and readers of hopeful stories chronicling grief and recovery.
Traveling with Ghosts
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Traveling with Ghosts.
By Shannon Leone Fowler.
Feb. 2017. 304p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781501107795). 578.77092.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Fowler's memoir could have been about her backpacking adventures around the world or becoming a marine biologist.
Instead, after her fiance, Sean, died when stung by a highly venomous box jellyfish in Thailand, it is a memoir tracing
her path of grief in the months that followed. Not being able to face the ocean, Fowler can't return to her PhD work, but
she can still travel. The solitary nature of traversing countries in which little English is spoken becomes most
appealing. Ten weeks after Sean's death, she sets out for cold, landlocked Eastern Europe, the very opposite of
Thailand. She visits Auschwitz, Bosnia, Hungary, Romania, Israel--places in their own states of violence, grief, and
recovery. It is in these places, where she can see people coming back from tragedy, that she begins to understand how
to continue her own irreparably altered life. Fowler incorporates chapters depicting her and Sean's developing
relationship, keeping him as present for the reader as he is for her. Fowler has turned her devastating, beautiful, honest,
and personal story into something universal. Akin to Cheryl Strayed's Wild (2012), her book will appeal to
globetrotters and readers of hopeful stories chronicling grief and recovery. --Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Traveling with Ghosts." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 10+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563409&it=r&asid=8693c2e2d828083ebfe98fdb906662fe.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563409
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QUOTE:
courageous and finely crafted account soaked in tears
of love and loss.
Fowler, Shannon Leone: TRAVELING WITH
GHOSTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fowler, Shannon Leone TRAVELING WITH GHOSTS Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 2, 21 ISBN:
978-1-5011-0779-5
A marine biologist who suffered a grievous loss when she was in her 20s debuts with a wrenching account of that loss,
her ensuing suffering, and her attempts to regain a sense of purpose.Be prepared to encounter time for what it really is
inside our minds, an out-of-balance mixture of tenses that makes clocks, calendars, and language itself seem
inadequate. In August 2002, Fowler (from California) and her fiance, Sean (an Australian), were in Thailand, where he
died almost immediately after being stung by a box jellyfish in the surf. The author's world collapsed. The two
appeared to have been created for each other, sharing a love of travel to remote places all over the world, a sense of
humor, and much more. Fowler recounts their travels that August and the following months, and she takes us back
earlier in their relationship and to her girlhood, when she first fell in love with the ocean. The narrative is segmented,
with chapters that leap about in time, resembling the actions of a mind and heart in distress. Throughout, the author
deals frankly with all aspects of her experience: the body of her lover, her fears of being assaulted as she traveled alone
around Eastern Europe afterward, Sean's family basically cutting her off later on. Fowler also shares the story of the
devotion--there is no other word--conferred upon her by two young Israeli women whom she didn't initially know but
who stuck with her in Thailand and beyond. They would not let her suffer and cope alone with all the bureaucratic
hassle. She also periodically inserts brief news accounts of quite a few others who died in similar fashion in the same
vicinity and wonders why there are not posted beach warnings. A courageous and finely crafted account soaked in tears
of love and loss.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Fowler, Shannon Leone: TRAVELING WITH GHOSTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901869&it=r&asid=b574b38f0589241209d4c63a4a7bfcfe.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901869
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QUOTE:
nicely written and informative journey on the path to healing
Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir
Shannon Leone Fowler. Simon & Schuster, $26 (294p) ISBN 978-1-5011-0779-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Fowler, a lover of the ocean and marine life from an early age who trained as a marine biologist, was devastated when
her fiance was killed by a jellyfish while they were on vacation in Thailand. Fowler's moving account traces her grief
following the accident. Unable to face the ocean, Fowler forced herself back into the world, traveling for four months
and visiting 10 countries off the usual tourist routes. She spent time with the two Israeli women who supported her
throughout the ordeal in Thailand; she ventures to war-ravaged Sarajevo. Fowler notes that, "After Israel and Bosnia,
Croatia seemed safe and peaceful and mellow." Wherever she travels, however, memories of her fiance are with her,
and she continues to come to terms with his death: she learns of other numerous deaths--she never is able to determine
how many--from the same deadly species of jellyfish near where her fiance died. Fowler notes that there were no
warnings regarding the poisonous jellyfish, and officials initially attempted to claim his death was caused by
drunkenness. This is nicely written and informative journey on the path to healing. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149951&it=r&asid=c4657a34d4c19819d51eaa043c6c0a71.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473149951
QUOTE:
It is a measure of Ms. Fowler’s great achievement in life and on the pages of her memoir that, while never minimizing the profound pain of her loss, she managed not only to survive but to say convincingly that “I know how lucky I have been.
When a holiday turned to grief
Print
By Martin Rubin - - Tuesday, April 4, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
TRAVELING WITH GHOSTS: A MEMOIR
By Shannon Leone Fowler
Simon & Schuster, $26, 289 pages
More than seven centuries ago the great medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri gave the classic description of the effect of loss on a human being: “Nessun maggior dolore/ Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/ Nella miseria,” which translates as “There is no greater pain/ than to recollect happy times/ in misery.” While marine biologist Shannon Leone Fowler is by no means the only person to experience this doleful process, the way in which she came to do so was particularly shocking.
On Aug. 9, 2002, she was swimming with her Australian boyfriend Sean Reilly on a beach in Thailand, when she felt something brush against her leg while they were kissing. It turned out to be a deadly box jellyfish, which soon wrapped itself round his legs, paralyzing him and rapidly ending his life. Her description of what happened next — the misreading of what happened to him, the shambolic scene on the beach and even at the clinic with false diagnoses and on and on through torment well conveyed — makes for searing reading. This is a writer who is a wonder at conveying pain amid a rush of emotions.
She is a wise writer, too, understanding the nature of danger, confronting it, which can sometimes leave one person unscathed and another destroyed. The crucial incident is a case in point and Sean an example of the gradations of fear, its subtle validities:
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“Sean had always been afraid of sea creatures. He’d been particularly nervous about sharks and since our arrival on the island had kept asking me, ‘Don’t most attacks happen in shallow water?’ I was studying to be a marine biologist and knew how unlikely a shark attack was, especially in Thailand. I kept assuring him he was more likely to be struck by lightning. ‘I just felt something,’ I began, but hadn’t finished the sentence when Sean flinched and dropped me.”
Coming from Australia, where shark attacks are all too frequent, his fear is rational, but if he was more likely to be struck by lightning than shark bitten, how much longer the odds to be stung almost instantly to death across the sea by a venomous jellyfish? Sean’s fear of sea creatures seems prophetic, but what is truly eerie is the gap between what seeded it and what would justify it.
If the most memorable parts of this memoir are the attack and dealing with its sequelae, its bulk concerns the picaresque journey undertaken by Ms. Fowler to achieve some kind of peace, interspersed with memories of her travels with Sean. Some of these places underscore the travails of others in order to put her individual loss in perspective. These include war-torn Bosnia, Israel, Moldova and even Auschwitz. There she did not flinch from engaging with the horrors that had taken place on that spot, including even the relics of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele’s hideous, sadistic experiments on children:
“But by far the most disturbing photos were the ones without captions. Before and after images in black and white of nameless children turned into ghosts, without any explanations provided. At the end of the experiments, the young victims’ dark haunted faces stared into the camera lens while the skeletal shadows of what remained of their naked bodies turned away.”
Then there are her own special pilgrimages, in their own way perhaps even more difficult for her to confront. Sean’s Australia and, hardest of all, Barcelona in Spain where Shannon and he met. Blending her intensely personal pain with historic and current anguish is done with finesse and a fine sense of proportion, never competing, never diminishing or devaluing.
It is a measure of Ms. Fowler’s great achievement in life and on the pages of her memoir that, while never minimizing the profound pain of her loss, she managed not only to survive but to say convincingly that “I know how lucky I have been.” Like William Wordsworth in his great Intimations Ode, she can “find/ Strength in what remains behind:/ In the primal sympathy/ Which having been must ever be.”
But unlike the great Romantic poet, she does not reject grieving, rather she embraces it boldly, thoughtfully, accepting its necessity as a part of the healing process. But, as in the essence of his poem which centers on recollection, she has found myriad ways — ranging from lighting candles to the Jewish mourning process of sitting shiva, physical keepsakes and mementos, and, most important of all keeping Sean in her heart and mind — to remember him. And such is her generosity of spirit that she can extend her memory to other victims of the box jellyfish: Her book is dedicated to Sean, but only as part of a list of others, some nameless, with the dates and location of their deaths when known — “And for anyone else whose death has not been recognized.” To which I can only bow my head in tribute not just to them, but to Ms. Fowler, who epitomizes Ernest Hemingway’s classic definition of courage: grace under pressure.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, California.
QUOTE:
gloriously rendered, beautifully written, but utterly devastating
Traveling With Ghosts; The Wild Other review – the journeys that follow grief
Shannon Leone Fowler and Clover Stroud have both produced compelling, heart-rending memoirs about their responses to the death of a loved one
Shannon Leone Fowler, who lost her fiance Sean in a bizarre accident.
Shannon Leone Fowler, who lost her fiance, Sean, in a bizarre accident. Photograph: Dorian Momsen
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Viv Groskop Viv Groskop
Sunday 26 February 2017 03.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.25 EDT
Harrowing memoirs are a bit like harrowing films. As long as they’re done beautifully, they feel life-changing. Still, it can be hard to recommend such things. I admire Manchester By the Sea more than any film I’ve seen in years but I’d still hesitate to “recommend” it to someone I didn’t know well. Both The Wild Other by Clover Stroud and Traveling With Ghosts by Shannon Leone Fowler fall into this category: gloriously rendered, beautifully written, but utterly devastating. Both are admirable. But neither are for the faint-hearted.
Clover Stroud’s story in The Wild Other is a maelstrom of a family mess, which kicks off when her idyllic rural childhood is shattered by a riding accident that puts her mother in a coma from which she never recovers: “My mother, who was alive and dead at the same time.” She looks back on this event, which happened when she was 16, from her own adult life as the mother of five children, prone to postnatal depression and frequently in crisis. Having known a parent who was “just love” for all the time she could remember, what came next “was as violent as flames licking through a house, burning everything that’s there and leaving the heart black like charcoal”.
Stroud tries to make sense of the chaos that builds up in her head by revisiting the love of horses, countryside and nature that was such a huge part of her early life – and her mother’s grand passion. She looks back, bewildered, at the promiscuity of her teen years, and at the insecurities that continued when she went away to university. She escapes to America where there are ranches and cowboys and where “danger increasingly felt like a necessary part of my relationship with the horses”. It all has the feel of a clear-eyed examination of a slow-motion car crash, drawn out over 20 years.
'I didn't realise he was dying': the day I lost my fiance
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There’s plenty of colour and self-awareness here that keeps you engrossed in Stroud’s life. Sometimes you want to give her a good shake. Is it really such a great idea to take up with the Cossack who has just joined your sister’s circus and travel regularly with him to Ossetia? But this was a time in her life when she needed a sense of adventure to feel that she was moving forward and you let her drag you along with her. There is always one last hurdle to face: the death of her mother after 22 years of her barely being alive. And that is what pushes her over the edge and into this narrative, which turns into a survivor’s tale that is both redemptive and cathartic.
No two kinds of grief are the same. And it’s no easier to get your head around what happened to Shannon Leone Fowler in Thailand in the summer of 2002, as she recounts in Traveling With Ghosts. One minute she was paddling in the sea with her fiance, Sean, wondering what they’d be having for dinner in a restaurant that night, the next she was looking at his corpse. In a freak occurrence (one of only 10 such instances recorded anywhere in the world in the past 20 years, as she notes in the book’s dedication), Sean was stung by a box jellyfish, the most venomous animal in the world, and killed almost instantly. You don’t have to tell her how ridiculous and unlikely this sounds.
Any sudden death is shocking. But Shannon Leone Fowler is left in a situation that seems utterly senseless and impossible to process. No one had warned them about these jellyfish. There was no mention of their existence in any guide. He was there one moment and gone the next, with no chance to ask for help or even the slightest chance of being saved. (Not all species of these box jellyfish are fatal to humans, but the one that attacked Sean kills within two to five minutes.)
At home in Santa Cruz, following Sean’s funeral in Australia, she returns to finish her PhD in marine biology and contemplate the savings she had made for her wedding and her new life. No one can say the right thing and everything is unimaginably awful. One question won’t leave her: “Who the fuck dies from a jellyfish?” Destroyed and lost, she writes in her diary: “Seems stupid to have money and not be travelling. Sean would.” She books a ticket to Budapest, somewhere English is not widely spoken, and she hopes she will be left alone.
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Shannon’s travel diary, “Sitting Shiva” – eastern Europe, Israel, the former Yugoslavia – is interspersed with memories of her previous travels with Sean and flashbacks to the days after his death, when she had to cope with two further horrors. First, the Thai authorities refused to accept that an accident had happened and wanted to list his death as a “drunk drowning”. Second, she had a miscarriage. The narrative meanwhile zigzags back and forth, mentally, geographically, historically, trying to process something that feels close to post-traumatic stress disorder. Thankfully she’s enough of a writer to make this an intimate and inspiring experience for the reader.
These memoirs are balm to the soul, as well as being necessary witness accounts of the blackest depths of grief.
• Traveling With Ghosts: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Shannon Leone Fowler is published by W&N (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• The Wild Other by Clover Stroud is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To order a copy for £15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
QUOTE:
Simple, honest and unsentimental, Traveling With Ghosts will be appreciated by those who have seen loved ones go in untimely deaths. It will also be a great read for those interested in world cultures.
Tulika Bahadur
Sometime last year, I stumbled upon a video of Jhumpa Lahiri in conversation with Paul Holdengräber, the Austrian-American Director of the New York Public Library. The subject was Lahiri’s relationship with Italian – I suppose her third language after Bengali and English – in which she is now writing entire books. Lahiri likened her engagement with Italian to being “at sea” – as in, she is in awe of the language, is experimenting with it but it is, ultimately, not her domain, which makes the process a risky one for her. Rephrasing the words of a Sicilian sailor (“skipper”), she presented the analogy:
“There’s one thing you have to know, which is, we don’t belong here. We’re human beings and we don’t belong on the water. And it’s dangerous and it can kill us. And it’s not where we are supposed to be. And you have to know this and have to respect that. And you have to respect the sea because it is so much more powerful than we are. And it really doesn’t like us. And yet we love it. We’re going to sail and we’re going to have a great week”…That’s what the skipper was saying – we’re not fish, we’re human beings and we’re not meant to be here. This is not our element.
Traveling With Ghosts: A Memoir of Love and Loss (2017, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
We realise and feel this power of the sea mostly during sweeping tsunamis. (On 25 February, 2016, I wrote a post on the 2013 book Wave – memoir of Britain-based Sri Lankan academic Sonali Deraniyagala, who lost her husband, her parents and her two little sons in the Indian Ocean catastrophe of 2004 – check it out). The violent antipathy of the water towards human beings can also manifest itself in more concentrated – but no less frustrating and horrifying – incidents of attack by toothed and tentacled dwellers. A recent Guardian feature titled ‘I didn’t realise he was dying’: the day I lost my fiance (February 18, 2017) carried one such heartrending story.
In the summer of 2002, globetrotting Californian Shannon Leone Fowler (@shannon_leone, @ShannonLeoneFowler) – a 28-year-old marine biologist researching Australian sea lions – was holidaying with her charming Australian fiancé Sean Reilly on the island of Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand. She was looking forward to a stable and happy life with him in Melbourne – when tragedy struck. Stung by a box jellyfish, Sean collapsed on the beach. Terribly poisoned, he died immediately, leaving Fowler disoriented and devastated. Plain baffled by the randomness and ridiculousness of the event – there had been no boards or signs of warning anywhere. She is hurt also, by the irony of it. She, a lover of the ocean since childhood (and scholar-in-training), is left standing in a state of helplessness as it snatches from her her other great love.
Traveling With Ghosts: A Memoir by Shannon Leone Fowler (2017, Simon & Schuster)
Fowler begins to feel the alien-ness of the land and the language around her. She has to get the cause of Sean’s death on a medical certificate corrected from “drunk drowning” to “an allergic reaction to jellyfish”. She communicates with the Thai police, with Sean’s insurance company back in Australia. Most importantly, she must execute the gigantic and disturbing task of breaking out the news to Sean’s parents, and then taking his body home to Melbourne. She also miscarries his baby, and with that goes the chance of her holding on to a part of him.
After his funeral, Sean’s family stops returning Fowler’s messages. They, whom she had eagerly hoped to join, suddenly turn into strangers. She returns to California but is unable to find peace among family and friends. On the one-month anniversary of Sean’s death, she writes in her journal: Seems stupid to have money & not be traveling. Sean would.
She decides to travel again – alone, to heal herself. To cope up with her paralysing pain, she makes a visit not to comforting fairytale landscapes but to countries that have been ravaged by conflicts. She goes to Poland, Israel, Bosnia, and other places. Befriends people. And she learns invaluable lessons – that tragedy needn’t be redeemed, just remembered; that grief needs time and space, also company; and finally, that it could be responded to with power and beauty and creativity.
On All Saints’ Day, Fowler finds herself in Poland. She writes: “Polish cemeteries would fill with people bringing flowers in the morning and then candles at night, tidying and blessing the graves not only of relatives, but also the old forgotten graves of strangers. But I hadn’t realized that this would be taking place at Auschwitz. I’d ended up there, on that day, entirely by chance. It was the first time since Sean’s death when it felt as if I was where I was supposed to be.”
Shannon Leone Fowler is today living in London. She has returned to the sea and had a successful career, having worked around both the Antarctic and the Arctic. She is now a single mother to three children who give her immense joy. But Sean’s absence remains, his demise having split her life into two clean parts of before and after. Sorrow is an all too undeniable, unmanageable part of life. Sometimes we just have to courageously admit and accept this fact. This is no resignation, but truth-telling. And a state of serenity may be achieved, in the end, precisely by not forcing oneself to look for silver linings.
Simple, honest and unsentimental, Traveling With Ghosts will be appreciated by those who have seen loved ones go in untimely deaths. It will also be a great read for those interested in world cultures. I loved it for the way it shows how the big happenings of history, and the lessons learnt through them, can have a life-altering impact on a small and single soul.
An excerpt:
I swung back and forth between the other three stages. There were flashes of anger. A fucking jellyfish. Who the fuck dies from a jellyfish? Why couldn’t it have been a car accident, a plane crash, cancer…something that actually happens to people?
There were hours feeling depressed and sorry for myself. I felt picked on by the world, pointless, and empty. My insides scraped clean like a hide, and dried out like a husk.
There were entire days spent bargaining. Why couldn’t it have been the British chick whose boyfriend always ate fried egg sandwiches, or the French guy on the bus, or one of the topless Swiss girls on the beach with the puppy? Or me, why couldn’t it have been me? I tried to trade his death for countless other tragedies: an affair that would break my heart, a crippling accident that would leave one or both of us wounded and scarred. The scientist in me knew it was irrational, yet it also seemed no more unlikely than his death. So I wished on everything I could think of, and made promises to whatever God there might be out there to raise any future children Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, whatever…if I could only have that day back.