John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was
thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in
Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania
when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian
Mountains. In an instant their life together was shattered. Katie
became separated from the group. When Evans finally found her, he
could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown
bear. In such a love story, such a life story, how could a person
ever move forward? That is the question Evans, traumatized and
restless, confronts in this book as he learns the language of
grief, the rhetoric of survival, and the contrary algorithms
of holding fast and letting go. His memories of Katie and their
time together, and the strangeness of his life with her family in
the year after her death, create an unsentimental but deeply moving
picture of loss, the brutality of nature, and the unfairness of
needing to narrate a story that nothing can prepare a person to
tell. Told with unyielding witness, elegance, and care, Young
Widower is a heartbreaking account of a senseless tragedy and the
persistence of grief in a young person’s life.