JEDDAH: Canadian writer and educator Amy Lin’s memoir, “Here After,” is a record of her bewildering transition into widowhood after the death of her beloved husband Kurtis. He was a 32-year-old architect who died while running a half-marathon during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s an immense generosity, and catharsis, in the way she invites the reader into what was undeniably one of the most painful experiences of her life. Her husband’s death was followed closely by her own serious medical crisis. In writing about all of this, Lin lays painfully bare that life, and its troubles, stubbornly carry on even as one has to come to terms with how quickly it can all end.
Her prose is spare, poetic and fragmented. Rather than offer up grief as a linear journey, she writes in short vignettes that move back and forth through time, shifting between the life she shared with Kurtis, and mimicking the strange, disjointed existence that followed his death.
These bursts of memories and a young woman’s confrontation of a horrible new fact of life come together as a meditation on both loss and love.
Recollections of everyday conversations, memorable moments, and domestic rituals sit alongside cremation arrangements, hospital visits, and the dull yet dreadful logistics that come with death.
Kurtis emerges through her writing as a fully loved person, making the book as much an act of remembrance as mourning.
A reluctant bond with the dog she was meant to adopt with him, frank conversations with fellow widows online, and friendships made stronger in the aftermath of loss gradually part the curtain, letting in small but unmistakable glimpses of hope.
For the second half, I switched to the audiobook, narrated by the author herself, whose heartfelt, beautifully measured delivery brings an added intimacy to an already personal work.
Perhaps the most urgent lesson woven into the memoir is that grief deserves, above all, to be witnessed and felt.
“Here After” is a wrenching but remarkably lucid portrait of a woman who becomes suddenly and painfully aware of the fragility and uncertainty of our existence.
