Sarah’s account of her life with partner Mark who had an undiagnosed brain condition but if no one can discover exactly what it is then there can be no treatment. It turned an active man into someone who can’t do anything for himself. A lot of it will resonate with carers who find themselves having to look after another person and be 100% responsible 100% of the time for everything. In my case though it took considerably longer for the resentment to creep in! There was an awful lot of how things affected her rather than Mark. Some interesting archaeology snippets but I wasn’t at all interested in the many different theories. This is an eye opener for anyone lucky enough not to be thrust into being a full time carer.

Thank you to #Netgalley and #PanMacmillan books for granting me access to this arc in return for an honest review.

Sarah Tarlow has gifted us a masterpiece companion on death, grief and the bonds we make with each other. Having studied death in different cultures and making a career teaching, Tarlow is able to delve respectfully, honestly and movingly on personal grief as her husband declines from an undiagnosed degenerative illness over a course of several years. The archaeology of loss is a crucial close up examination of grief, loss and coping with both.
Highly recommended.

Sarah Tarlow’s account of her life and loss is one of the most memorable autobiographies I’ve ever read. Her honesty is heartbreaking and it’s difficult to express how profoundly moving I found the story, without it being one of overwhelming grief and loss. She recounts every small and large moment in the life of her soulmate and later husband, Mark. My heart went out to them as they tried to deal with the devastating effect of an unknown neurological condition and try to carry on as normal. But there was no normal. I understand the anger Sarah felt and her resilience in trying to cope with the demands of work, home and illness are Beyoncéd remarkable.

I learned a great deal from this book; both are/were academics and the archaeological accounts were fascinating. Sarah Tarlow is a gifted writer and an individual with insight and compassion. It’s a haunting story, so eloquently expressed and I hope all involved are now able to find some peace after dealing with this dreadful loss.

It's hard not to admire the straightforward honesty of Sarah Tarlow's memoir The Archaeology of Loss, which deals with her husband's long illness and eventual suicide as his health rapidly deteriorated from an unknown neurological condition. Near the end, which I skimmed forward to read, she writes, 'Now that I have arranged the time of Mark's illness and death into a story, I wish the character of me was a bit nicer. I wish I had behaved both more kindly and more confidently, and I do not quite remember why I did not... I wish I had been the kind of person for whom love had been enough, but I am not and it was not.' But Tarlow's complicated relationship with her husband was only human, and this memoir is brave in showing the difficulties and resentments of becoming a carer for a romantic partner who (because they too are only human) hasn't always behaved well towards you. I think other readers will get much more out of this book than I did; I wanted both more archaeological material and for it to be more intimately woven into the narrative, whereas this is really a simple telling of this period of Tarlow's life with a few archaeological/historical anecdotes about the way the dead were handled in the past. Few memoirs can manage this immensely difficult task of weaving together the personal with wider themes, though, and this should still be a valuable read for the right person.

I loved this book! You might be fooled into thinking this is just another memoir of grief but it's so much more than that. The archaeological insights are fascinating and the way this context is used to explore Sarah's emotional and physical response to terminal illness and grief are truly remarkable. Highly recommend!

Publisher's Description: "When you find your husband lying dead, you think you will not forget a single detail of that moment. As an archaeologist, I like to get my facts right, and I will try my best to do so, but five years have passed since that day in 2016 and I am excavating my own unreliable memory. I cannot go back and check."

Sarah Tarlow's husband Mark began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness, leaving him incapable of caring for himself. One day, about six years after he first started showing symptoms, Mark waited for Sarah and their children to leave their home before ending his own life.

Although Sarah had devoted her professional life to the study of death and how we grieve, she found that nothing could have prepared her for the reality of illness and the devastation of loss.

What I Loved
A realistic, no-holds-barred account of being a carer. It isn't all about being selfless and devoted. Sometimes we are withdrawn or bad-tempered. In turn, the person being cared for is not always at their best and gushing with gratitude. "Mark became reclusive, irritable, caustic with the children. My love was too weak to sustain us."

Although it's a heavyweight topic, and there is no happy ending, Tarlow infuses the telling with wit and humour, and there is plenty of her archaeological insight.

Thanks to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the advance reader copy. The Kindle edition is published on 20 April.

(This review will be published on my blog on 20 April. The link will be active on 20 April, see Add LInks section.

This book was not at all what I thought I was going to read - I expected mostly archeology, with a bit of memoir, based on summaries read online, and it was the other way around: a memoir, with a bit of archeology sprinkled on top.

I still loved it a lot. Sarah Tarlow writes about the death of her husband, Mark, his deterioration from an unkown and undiagnosed illness, and his death by suicide in 2016, on a rare evening she was out.

Sarah's husband does not come across as a nice person, even when she remembers the start of their relationship, when she was fascinated by how smart, witty and quick he was - he is also judgmental, unromantic, and, although she doesn't word it that way... just not a feminist. He's a man who sharpens the kitchen knives in the evening but leaves raising children, doing the laundry, cooking, payingthe bills, to his wife. She's so incredibly honest in her retelling of their relationship when he became ill, remembering how she hoped at some point that he would get better so that they could separate (she ended up marrying him - two weeks before his death and just on time to make her life as a widdow slightly "better" than if they had not been married). She goes on and on about how difficult he was, how he made her feel guilty the one time she had a friend around, when she was working and managing his care completely - on top of raising three children. She goes into details about the life of a carer - being late at work because the carer you hired is late in traffic, having to learn skills you never developed because the other person was in charge, feeling like everything relies on you and never having a day off.

There is some archeology, every now and then - she makes parallels between her life and her situation; and what she has encountered through work, but this really is a memoir about dealing with a very ill partner, not being sure whether he would make it or not, and trying to cope. Sarah is so honest about the ugly sides of it, including her wanting to escape, her having to care for someone she was no longer getting on with, looking after kids when their father is dying, feeling bad for not feeling guilty after a suicide... I felt at times I wished she was near me so I could squeeze her arm in sympathy: it was that raw and that well-written.

I can see in the acknowledgements that she has since met someone new, and it genuinely made me feel so happy for her. I found it incredibly moving and sad and I hope it brought her peace: in the book I can see she is being super honest and trying to show everything she did, including things she was not sure about, and she writes beautifully about her frustrations looking after someone who is very ill. And despite what might seem ugly or unkind at times - making a show of how things are difficult around him, being moody and not being up to chat -, I felt nothing but understanding towards her and I loved this book. I like to imagine that because it is so honest, it was somehow therapeutic for her, and I hope so.

Anyway. 5 stars. I found it surprisingly moving and interesting, and the writing was beautiful in a straightforward kind of way.

Some books feel impossible to write about, due to not being able to find words good enough to do them justice. This is one. Searingly honest, devastating and heart wrenching yet hauntingly beautiful, fascinating and heart warming at the same time, As someone who’s experienced both losing someone to a neurological illness with no cure or treatment and my own share of health issues, I can honestly say every word, feeling and thought expressed in this rang painfully true and will stay nestled in my heart for a long time to come.,

It's very difficult to review a memoir, most of all when it's so personal as this one. After reading this book, which tells a heartbreaking story about the spouse of the author who died from suicide after an undiagnosed illness made their life increasingly difficult, it feels inappropriate to critique the book. It's written very well, and I grew to really care for Sarah and Mark. Her thoughts on how lacking our societal conversation is about caregiving (we don't want to talk about how difficult it can be, and we tend to shift the focus to how noble and loving caregiving is - even when it isn't) are excellent and needed.

However, I feel like the focus of this book was not so much on loss, but more on being a caregiver, and so, it didn't really meet my expectations. Not to say that it isn't an important topic as well, but I felt like I didn't really read what I had expected to read about (which was, Sarah's personal experience of loss in the context of archaeology and the human experience of loss throughout history).

Finally, a little afterthought for this review. Something in the final chapter bothered me a little: Sarah's insistence that we should coin a new term for a suicide which doesn't stem from mental illness, because "his was an act of courage and love. Say 'suicide' and people think of the desperate act of an otherwise healthy individual succumbing to severe depression. [..] with the right help, this kind of suicide should not be inevitable: their depression could have been treated."
As someone with my own experience in bereavement by suicide, this bugs me a little. Depression is not always treatable. Suicides where the person has mental ilnessess can be an act of courage and love too. My personal take is, let's expand this rigid definition of suicide and work to erase the stigma, instead of coining a new term so some people circumvent this stigma.
I definitely understand where she's coming from though. It can be hard to be confronted with people's assumptions and feelings, and I'm glad this book exists to try and help break open the conversation surrounding not only suicide, but death, caregiving, and terminal illness as well.