REVIEW: A Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief by B.J. Hollars

Reviewed by Emily Webber

B.J. Hollars’s emotionally charged memoir, A Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief, explores the impact of a terminal cancer diagnosis and death on his family.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hollars receives a phone call from his father-in-law, Steve Ball, and Hollars documents from there using interviews, pictures, memories, and details of how the family navigates the year that follows. The structure of this book adds to its power. In a section after Steve dies, there are simply a few pages of photographs of his house being cleaned out by Hollars’s wife, Meredith. The book is divided into three sections: Before, During, and After, and the writing interspersed with photos and interviews results in a deeply personal account of how the loss of a loved one can fracture a family, how people can never truly be prepared to face death or know how to support others through grief.

The reader, of course, likely doesn’t know Steven Ball or the Hollars family. Hollars’s father-in-law lived a very ordinary, simple life, and yet the deep impact of losing a loved one is felt. Each section of the book transitions through the stages of having a loved one diagnosed with a terminal illness—from still having hope that medical interventions will work, to trying to spend as much quality time together while the person feels well enough, and then watching someone go through the dying process, and the aftermath of grief. This book is so inspiring because it does not make grand revelations. Hollars focuses on everyday life, which can be tedious and mundane, like grading papers, shutting kids around, or waiting for medical results. What becomes apparent is that many Americans don’t have the language to be able to talk about death with each other. Hollars attempts to support his wife, but the powerful loneliness associated with grief is hard to break past, especially since both of his parents are still living.

Every reader will see themselves in these pages, breaking their heart wide open, but it will also be a comfort. My family received the same call during the pandemic, and my husband lost his dad to cancer, separated in different countries with no ability to see each other again. My father-in-law would never really know our son, and I had hoped he could write a letter to him—what I longed for was for him to make meaning of death and to tell us how to go on, share the unique wisdom he shared so readily with us when he was healthy. In the end, there was no time for proper goodbyes, only video calls where we struggled with what to say and where my father-in-law was overcome with emotion because he didn’t want to die or with extreme fatigue and confusion.

There’s the instinct to try and find some profound meaning or revelation in death, yet all it comes down to is the love you share. As Meredith sits with her dad, they come to understand this, as they flip through recipes of food, he likely won’t be able to eat anymore:

All Meredith and her father have left to do is demonstrate devotion. Take care of each other in the modest ways they can. Flip pages. Discuss recipes and the memories they spur. Recount the past one last time. Talk about everything that came before, but never a word of what comes next.

Like me, Hollars hopes for an otherworldly revelation from his father-in-law when he uncovers some recordings Steve made after his death.

Standing alone in the coffee shop, recorder in hand, I’m hoping for some direct address from Steve. Some secret wisdom sprinkled in amid the banter. Just a hint of the future we’ve got coming. Or a little guidance on where we go from here.

The recording runs out long before any revelations.

But what a joy it must have been to hear that voice again. I took great comfort in the fact that Hollars documented his own family’s struggle with how to say goodbye in the best way and that it didn’t ultimately look like what they imagined. Throughout the book, Hollars tries to find the best, last thing to say to his father-in-law. In the end, it isn’t the words that matter:

Placing my hand in Steve’s hand, I think of him giving me the key to the coffee shop. The time we’d played handball at the Y. And that night every November when we’d select the family Christmas tree from the Boy Scouts in the abandoned parking lot where they set up shop…. And then once the real work was done, how he’d retreat to the couch with a bowl full of grapefruit, leaving the rest of us to deal with the ornaments.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

While this book is indeed heavy throughout (and I’ll admit to crying through the entire middle section), there’s an epitaph at the beginning from the poet Amy Fleury: “What would we make of a life both blighted and blessed? There was trouble all around and everywhere little mercies.” Every moment documented in A Year of Plenty leads to this: sometimes, people face profoundly devastating circumstances without a cure or way out. Yet there are still times with family, full of ordinary, simple joys, making lasting memories. When Meredith says she thinks it will be the day Steve dies, Hollars takes their kids to Fox Island. There, he encounters one of the little mercies that Fleury writes about:

Indeed, we have stumbled upon the “dog beach” section of the waterfront. A couple of owners roam barefoot along the bank as their dogs thunder between shoreline and water. The dogs appear recklessly happy in their pursuit of a tossed ball, flinging sand in all directions with their paws. There is time enough to sniff everything. And enough vegetation to keep the tossed ball hidden for a while.

If dogs can smile, these dogs do. And since we can, we try.

When someone is alive and healthy, it is easy to think that you have all the time in the world to say everything you need. When someone is sick and dying, Hollars shows how impossible it is to come up with the right words. The grace that Hollars provides the reader with in A Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief, in sharing his own very personal story, is that no matter how ill-equipped we are to deal with death, in the end, if we live a life where we love well and focus on being present with the people who matter to us, that is the part that will ultimately remain.