A Young Widow Rewrites the Conventional Narrative of Grief

Photo by BBC Creative on Unsplash Amy Lin’s debut memoir, Here After , is a taut, poetic, and intimate exploration of heartbreaking loss, devasting grief, and its unfathomable aftermath. In potent, swift, and artful prose, she details the love, and loss, of her husband, Kurtis, a vibrant human and skillful architect, who died suddenly, and without distinguishable cause, while running a virtual half-marathon. Craftily moving between depictions before and after the soul-shattering tragedy—celebratory wedding reception vodka-waters to a necessary, life-saving stent—Lin lays bare the beauty of their relationship and the emotional and physical toll of her grief. At the beginning of 2024, Amy Lin and I caught up over Zoom and discussed the present tense of grief, the inadequacy of language, the gift of both seeing and been seen. Jared Jackson: Though the structure of the memoir is nonlinear, the entire book is written in the present tense. Why did you make this decision? Did it have anything to do with the way you experienced grief? Amy Lin: The thing about grief, for me, certainly, was that when I entered into it, I fell out of time. Which is to say, the ways in which we tend to quantify established time—past, present, future—completely eroded for me. And my life as it had been, my life with Kurtis, it felt as real, if not more real, than my life after he died. That’s what grief does, it completely deflates these realms. I, temporally, was completely lost, and the memories of our life, the memories of who I was—a wife, married, the choices that I had made—none of them brought me to my present. Even when I was burying Kurtis, right? I truly was like, no, I am a wife. But I wasn’t married and I wasn’t a wife—not anymore—and it’s really disorienting when what is no longer feels more real than what is present. Biologically, what the brain can’t process is that what is real neurologically is not actually real anymore. So, for me, everything in grief is present tense. JJ: Can we stay there for second? You mentioned the […]

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