When the Author Behind the Walk Loses Someone: On Cheryl Strayed and the Weight of Grief
Cheryl Strayed wrote her way out of grief once before. In Wild, she turned the loss of her mother into one of the most widely read memoirs of the last twenty years—a book about walking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, about the body as a way of knowing, about whether you can outpace the things that have broken you. The answer, it turned out, was no. But the walking mattered anyway.
Last week, Strayed announced on Instagram that her husband, documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, had died. He was sixty-five. He died from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. She wrote that he died «the way he lived—with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life.» She wrote that her family was «utterly bereft.» She also wrote that they would search for «the beauty Brian knew was there.»
I have been thinking about that phrase since I read it. It is not a consolation—Strayed knows better than to offer false ones. It is more like a promise, or perhaps a discipline. To look for what someone you loved saw in the world, even after they are gone. To let their way of seeing become, in some small way, part of your way of seeing.
Lindstrom was not widely famous outside documentary circles. His films—Kicking, about substance use recovery; Alien Boy, about a man with schizophrenia who died in police custody; Lost Angel, about the singer Judee Sill—were the work of someone who looked carefully at people the culture tends to look past. That, too, seems worth noting: that the man who shared a life with one of America’s most celebrated memoirists was himself, quietly, an observer and chronicler of lives that might otherwise go unrecorded.
There is something almost unbearable about writers losing the people they love. Not because writers suffer more than others—they do not—but because they are unusually aware of the problem of language: that there are no words adequate to this, and yet here we are, reaching for words anyway.
Strayed will write about this, eventually. Or she will not. That is her prerogative. In the meantime, there is something useful in remembering what her work has already given: not solutions, not comfort in the easy sense, but the company of someone who looked at the hardest things and kept going. Knausgård once wrote that the purpose of literature was not to console but to accompany. I think of that often when I think of Wild. Brian Lindstrom sounds, from everything we know, like someone who understood that instinctively. May he rest with the gentleness and grace he carried through life.
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