USA TODAY International Edition
On fiancé’s death, writer travels with ‘ Ghosts’
Fowler’s memoir is a moving tribute to love and wander
Frolicking in the sea with her fiancé 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 shortterm 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., eeeg) 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 returned 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 Győr 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 selfaggrandizement 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 kickstart healing. But hers is a thought- provoking journey that she generously shares.