Spotlight: Year of Plenty: A Family's Season of Grief by B.J. Hollars
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In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.”
So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?
Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death’s all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture—rather than strengthen—even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.
Excerpt
March 19–22, 2021
No one billed it as “Steve’s Last Trip to Florida.” Nobody had to.
The night before they leave, I slip a few paperbacks into the chil
dren’s backpacks. And then, the following day, I video chat with them on the plane, directing them to the backpack pockets where their presents await.
“Awesome!” Ellie says, flipping through the pages of some book
from some series she loves.
“Thanks, Dad,” Henry says, reading the back copy on his own.
“Nothing for you, Mil,” I tell Millie, lowering my voice to a
whisper. “Because you can’t read.”
She laughs at my glitching face on the screen.
“Well, we’re about to take off . . . ,” Meredith says.
“Love you guys,” I say. “Be safe.”
“We will,” Meredith promises, adjusting Millie’s mask.
“Everyone say bye to Dad.”
“Bye, Dad!”
Just like that, my family vanishes.
___
I know what I know of the trip because of what Meredith, Henry, and Ellie told me. But there’s no making up what I miss, only the uneasy knowledge that I’ve missed it.
That evening, I do not witness their nighttime arrival at the
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motel and Millie’s first glimpse of the ocean. I miss the kids flipping open their suitcases, retrieving swimsuits, flinging their bodies at the mercy of those thunderous midnight waves. I miss their glee ful screams as they test buoyancy in the icy waters. I observe no teeth-chattering aftermath.
But as Henry tells it, when he wakes at dawn and peers out
the window, he spots his grandfather—whom he hasn’t seen since Christmas—standing in the receding waves. Fishing pole in hand, Steve casts, waits, reels, repeats—a body pressed tall against infinity.
At the sight of him, Henry wakes the others. Together, with
varying lengths of strides, they sprint from the motel room toward the ocean, hollering for their Boppy.
“How’s he look?” I ask Meredith during a phone call later that
day.
“Okay,” she says. “I mean, skinny . . . but . . . okay.”
“Okay’s okay,” I say.
“It’s better than bad,” she agrees.
___
Henry forgets to reapply sunscreen and pays a terrible price. By midday of the first full day, he’s almost more lobster than boy.
“We need to get you a hat,” Meredith says. “Like one of those
old-man hats.”
Steve drives them to the store, where Meredith, Henry, and
Ellie fan out in search of a hat. Eventually, Henry discovers a wide brimmed Tommy Bahama and slips it on his head, transforming from an eight- to an eighty-year-old.
When they rendezvous with Steve, they find him pushing
Millie in the cart.
“Where did that come from?” Meredith asks, nodding to the
comically large plush cow seated beside Millie.
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“I was told she needed it,” Steve says, straight-faced.
“Cow!” Millie clarifies. “Mine!”
“And who exactly told you that?” Meredith smiles. “I mean,
besides her.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Steve shrugs, pushing the cart forward.
“Somebody who works here, I guess.”
___
Back in Wisconsin, I spend the weekend alone untangling a “very serious essay.” I take my “very serious essay” very seriously because this, I believe, is what “very serious writers” must do. Or try to do, at least, when they cannot be with the seriously ill people they love or the seriously hurting people who love them.
___
For the last two days of the trip, Henry embraces his wide-brimmed hat, wearing it faithfully throughout the motel grounds during our daily video chat.
“And these are the palm trees,” he explains, pointing the phone
their way. “And here is the pool. Oh, and this is shuffleboard.”
He directs me toward the shuffleboard court, where I see sev
eral older men who appear to be wearing hats quite like Henry’s.
“You’re just one of the guys now, huh?” I ask.
“Yup,” he says, half hearing me. “Oh, let me show you the ocean.
You won’t believe this ocean . . .”
I close my eyes, trying to avoid motion sickness as he bobbles
me toward the beach.
“Here it is!”
“That’s some ocean,” I agree.
Next stop, up the motel stairs to their room, where his sisters
watch a show while his mom washes her face.
“Where’s Boppy?” I ask, scanning the scene.
“Maybe taking a nap?” Henry says.
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“It’s morning,” I say.
“Yeah,” Henry says. “Boppy likes naps.”
“Can I talk to Mommy?”
He hands over the phone.
“How’s it going?”
“Fine.”
“How’s your dad?”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“I mean . . . withdrawn. He’s just not feeling very good.”
“So not fine?” I clarify.
“Correct,” she agrees. “Not fine at all.”
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About the Author
B.J. Hollars is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Go West, Young Man; Midwestern Strange; The Road South; and Flock Together. The founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.
