In the wake of her mother’s untimely death at the age of forty-five, Cheryl Strayed loses more than just a parent and a best friend—slowly, little by little, she begins to lose her family too. As Cheryl’s nuclear family grows more and more distant in the wake of their shared loss, Cheryl begins to believe that that’s simply what loss does: it divides and estranges people at the moment when they should be coming together in mutual grief. Over the course of Wild, Cheryl learns that loss has the potential to pull people apart, but can also, amazingly, do the opposite. Ultimately, Strayed suggests that grief and loss are extreme, unpredictable forces that have the power to either send people scattering in disparate directions—or bring them together in shared, collective mourning and healing.
At the start of the book, it seems as if grief creates only one outcome: a breakdown in connection. After her mother Bobbi dies, Cheryl struggles to keep the disparate threads of her family together. Though she and Eddie sat at Bobbi’s side every day she was in the hospital, in Bobbi’s final days, the family had already begun to break apart. Cheryl’s siblings Karen and Leif barely visited the hospital during the duration of their mother’s illness—and Leif never even got to say goodbye, as he arrived at the hospital to visit Bobbi for the first time after she’d already died. After Bobbi’s death, Cheryl is forced to realize that in spite of all her best efforts, she is not able to keep her family together singlehandedly. Her mother, she realizes was “the apparently magical force at the center of [the] family who’d kept [them] all spinning in the powerful orbit around her.” Eddie, in the wake of Bobbi’s passing, becomes a “stranger” to his stepchildren, and swiftly marries another woman with children of her own. Leif and Karen and Cheryl, all grown, drift into the daily demands of their own lives. Soon, Cheryl recognizes that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot keep her family tethered together—they are “floating separately among the flotsam of [their] grief,” barely connected at all anymore. Cheryl’s loss cleaves her from people other than her family, too. Her marriage to her husband Paul begins to suffer almost immediately after Bobbi’s passing. Cheryl and Paul become veritable strangers as a divide opens between them. Cheryl is envious and resentful of her husband, whose family is happy and intact. In spite of Paul’s attempts to comfort Cheryl and thus keep their marriage together, Cheryl feels that something inside her is “dead” to Paul, and she begins having affairs, one-night stands, and dabbling in drug use. Cheryl, doubly traumatized by her mother’s loss and her family’s disintegration, has begun to believe that loss only serves to estrange people from one another, and she acts in accordance with that learned belief as she leans headfirst into the destruction of her marriage.
As the book progresses and Cheryl meets new people along the Pacific Crest Trail, she understands that loss and grief don’t always have to estrange people from one another—they can also bring people together. Cheryl begins to recognize that loss and grief are dynamic forces whose arrival in any given life can have unpredictable effects. Cheryl embarks on the PCT feeling like “the woman with the hole in her heart.” She is hyperconscious of how broken she has become—and worried that the people she meets will be able to intuitively sense that she is damaged goods. However, when Cheryl at last has an encounter with someone who has known and suffered true loss—Lou, a woman who picks up Cheryl while she’s hitchhiking—she realizes that grief doesn’t have to be an alienating thing. Cheryl can’t imagine the magnitude of Lou losing her five year old son—but she sees that in the wake of her grief, Lou has moved forward in her life and found love and community. Lou carries her son’s picture with her always and admits that her grief has fundamentally changed her, but she isn’t closed off to new people, new experiences, and new chances for joy.
Cheryl struggles to maintain even a semblance of a connection with some of the people who were closest to both her and her mother, such as her stepfather Eddie. At the same time, she finds that her experience of loss and grief binds her deeply and instantly to people she barely knows, like Lou. Over the course of her hike, Cheryl understands the instability and volatility loss and grief leave in their wake, and she is able to accept and respect the varying ways in which those often cataclysmic forces act upon different people.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Loss and Grief ThemeTracker
Loss and Grief Quotes in Wild
I’d been so many things already. A loving wife and an adulteress. A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. An ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer who hopped form one meaningless job to the next while dabbling dangerously with drugs and sleeping with too many men. […] But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now. […] It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.
It took me years […] to be the woman my mother raised. […] I would suffer. […] I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
[Monster] looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do. I sat down on the floor beside it and pondered my situation. How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles […] if I couldn’t even budge it an inch? […] The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack.
My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail. I was in entirely new terrain.
I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.
I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. […] Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. […] But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning.
[My pack] was still the biggest pack of the bunch—hiking solo, I had to carry things that those who hiked in pairs could divvy up, and I didn’t have the ultralight confidence or skills that Greg did—but in comparison to how my pack had been before Albert helped me purge it, it was so light I felt I could leap into the air.
“Come back,” I called lightly, and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did.
And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.
“You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your feet.”
I looked at him in the dark. […] “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. […]
“Well then, you’re lucky.” He said. “Not everyone gets a horse.”
“I look the same, but I’m not the same in here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of me. I try not to act like it, but it did. It took the Lou out of Lou, and I ain’t getting it back. You know what I mean?”
“I do,” I said. […]
“I thought so,” she said. “I had that feeling about you.”
I could pack up [Monster] in five minutes now. […] Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one.
My new boots had only chawed my feet afresh. I was passing through the beautiful territory I’d come to take for granted, my body finally up to the task of hiking the big miles, but because of my foot troubles, I sank into the grimmest despair. […] Perhaps my feet would never be okay.
There were so many […] amazing things in this world.
They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn’t know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full.
I reached the border only minutes later, stopping to take it in: California and Oregon, an end and a beginning pressed up against each other. For such a momentous spot, it didn’t look all that momentous. There was only a brown metal box that held a trail register and a sign that said WASHINGTON: 498 MILES—no mention of Oregon itself.
What if I forgave myself? […] What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? […] What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? […] What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland. […] This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.
The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.
It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. […] How wild it was, to let it be.
