Cheryl and Paul become veritable strangers as a divide opens between them. Her marriage to her husband Paul begins to suffer almost immediately after Bobbi’s passing. Cheryl’s loss cleaves her from people other than her family, too. Soon, Cheryl recognizes that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot keep her family tethered together-they are “floating separately among the flotsam of grief,” barely connected at all anymore. Leif and Karen and Cheryl, all grown, drift into the daily demands of their own lives. Her mother, she realizes was “the apparently magical force at the center of family who’d kept all spinning in the powerful orbit around her.” Eddie, in the wake of Bobbi’s passing, becomes a “stranger” to his stepchildren, and swiftly marries another woman with children of her own.

After Bobbi’s death, Cheryl is forced to realize that in spite of all her best efforts, she is not able to keep her family together singlehandedly. Cheryl’s siblings Karen and Leif barely visited the hospital during the duration of their mother’s illness-and Leif never even got to say goodbye, as he arrived at the hospital to visit Bobbi for the first time after she’d already died. Though she and Eddie sat at Bobbi’s side every day she was in the hospital, in Bobbi’s final days, the family had already begun to break apart. After her mother Bobbi dies, Cheryl struggles to keep the disparate threads of her family together. Ultimately, Strayed suggests that grief and loss are extreme, unpredictable forces that have the power to either send people scattering in disparate directions-or bring them together in shared, collective mourning and healing.Īt the start of the book, it seems as if grief creates only one outcome: a breakdown in connection. Over the course of Wild, Cheryl learns that loss has the potential to pull people apart, but can also, amazingly, do the opposite. As Cheryl’s nuclear family grows more and more distant in the wake of their shared loss, Cheryl begins to believe that that’s simply what loss does: it divides and estranges people at the moment when they should be coming together in mutual grief. In the wake of her mother’s untimely death at the age of forty-five, Cheryl Strayed loses more than just a parent and a best friend-slowly, little by little, she begins to lose her family too.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed