Of all the emotions humans experience, the one with the greatest number of manifestations has to be grief. Nothing can truly prepare you for it, and no loss will be experienced in the same way.

In many ways, Mary Odgers was living the American dream. Her husband was a commercial pilot for Delta Airlines, she was an acute-care nurse, and they had delighted in raising their three now-grown sons in the home they had built in the beautiful Ramona Valley of Southern California. But on one October day, the winds suddenly changed, shifting a raging wildfire in the direction of that dream home—and putting into motion a series of unthinkable losses over the next 14 months that Mary never imagined possible.

Overwhelmed by unimaginable grief, Mary not only had to process the disparate emotions tied to each of the losses, but she eventually had to make a choice: remain in the space of despair, or find ways through her pain toward a reinvention of herself. With incredible strength and determination, she chose the latter. When two more losses followed soon afterward, along with the chance of newfound love, she was faced once again with traversing shades of grief, but also with embracing a leap of faith into a whole new future.

Told in eight distinct vignettes, Six Funerals and a Wedding is an unconventional memoir that invites us into the markedly different stories of the treasured entities Mary loved and lost, the raw and varied nuances that grief holds, and the unexpected love story that sparked a new chapter—all with profound honesty, and with an ever-present undercurrent of hope that reminds us that evolution is possible through loss, that life can go on and be beautiful, and how remarkably resilient the human spirit can be.