Four loved ones, gone, in the space of seventeen months. Unimaginable. But as journalist Jill Smolowe buried her husband, then her sister, mother, and mother-in-law, she had no trouble imagining what would follow. Films and memoirs, after all, offer only one script for the newly widowed: you fall apart. To Smolowe’s surprise and relief, that day never arrived. When friends insisted that her strength was “amazing,” she began to wonder if there was something freakish about her grief. Delving into modern bereavement research, she discovered a stunning bottom line: far from being uncommon, resilience like hers is the norm. In a story laced with humor, insight, and love, Smolowe finally gives voice to this silent majority. With a lens firmly trained on what helped her tolerate so much sorrow and rebound from so much loss, Smolowe jostles preconceptions about caregiving, defies clichés about grief, and offers often counterintuitive answers to those questions all of us eventually confront: What do I say? How can I help? How would I cope if it were me? Deeply moving and quietly wise, Four Funerals and a Wedding reminds us that grief is not only about endings—it’s about new beginnings.

Jill Smolowe is the author of the memoir An Empty Lap: One Couple’s Journey to Parenthood and co-editor of the anthology A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents. An award-winning journalist, she has been a foreign affairs writer for Time and Newsweek, and a senior writer for People, where she currently specializes in crime stories. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post Magazine, Adoptive Families and the Reader’s Digest “Today’s Best NonFiction” series.