Calgary, Canada-based Amy Lin's debut, the stark yet affecting bereavement memoir Here After, commemorates a marriage cut short and charts the emotions of early widowhood.
Lin and Kurtis had been together for almost seven years, married for 21 months, when in August 2020, Kurtis--a healthy 32-year-old architect--dropped dead during a half-marathon near their vacation home. Just 10 days later, Lin underwent an emergency procedure to treat blood clots in her leg, abdomen, and lungs. The health crisis forced the bewildered 31-year-old widow to face a future she wasn't sure existed without Kurtis.
Fragmentary chapters of a few lines or paragraphs flow back and forth between the early days of their relationship and the confusion of the two years following Kurtis's death. After a year, Lin returns to teaching, sells their apartment, and gets a puppy. The present-tense scenes create a continuous narrative such that readers, too, can hardly believe that exuberant Kurtis could be gone. Especially poignant are her interactions with Kurtis's friends and several grief counselors, who have varying levels of compassion. Lin recognizes her contradictions as she avoids or longs for human connection: "I do not know how to explain my chronic discord, the push-me-pull-me of my sadness. I want to be invited. I cannot attend."
There is sparse poetry to her rhetorical questions and metaphorical laments: "How can grief be so universal and yet still so widely misunderstood?" and "My dark heart drags with me everywhere." After tragedy, she finds neither closure nor (perhaps not yet) meaning, but she surely finds beauty--in language, if nothing else. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck