My obsession with dead spouse memoirs disconcerts my husband. He wonders if I have fantasies about his demise, but I am conducting a very different kind of research. As a psychiatrist, I spend many hours sitting with people who have been left behind; sorrow is the water my patients tread. And although I am personally familiar with the contours of grief’s undercurrents, narratives of bereavement remind me how deep and cold the water can be.
Amy Lin’s debut memoir Here After is a full-on free-dive into loss. Lin recounts falling in love with her husband, Kurtis, and his sudden death at age 32 while running a half marathon. Just 10 days after Kurtis collapses, a pain in Lin’s left thigh leads to the discovery of a net of blood clots in her legs and abdomen. Lin wonders if she can survive either of these events — and if she even wants to try. She struggles to convey her suffering to those around her and frequently receives feedback to, please, stop bumming everyone out (“I can’t hear about this,” one acquaintance says memorably, “I have to protect my light”). With the encouragement of her therapist, Lin begins writing a series of Substack posts reflecting on her grief. She has noted in interviews that these entries ultimately became the skeleton of her memoir.
It would be easy for Here After to not be a great book. It could fall into the trap of the torture-wracked contemporary memoir, where a single essay or a handful of blog posts are picked up by a publisher and forced to stretch thinly across the requisite 250 pages. Lin’s description of her relationship could have become overly sentimental or so myopically personal that the book ultimately has little to say about our modern experience of suffering. Thankfully, Here After does none of these things. Instead, in taut, lyric prose, Lin offers us a primer on the burden and survivability of grief. And her first lesson begins with the book’s form.
Here After is composed of 184 numbered sections, the longest spanning three pages and the shortest a single sentence:
21
When he dies, I fall out of time.
And we fall alongside her; Lin sets her entire book in present tense but arranges the sections non-chronologically. Without past or future, we toggle swiftly between Kurtis’ dead body at the hospital, “his skin … set, the way milk does when it is heated,” and Kurtis filling his car with so many balloons for Lin’s birthday that he gets into a minor car accident. Lin’s formal decisions struck me as unusual, so I went to my widow memoir bookshelf and pulled down a few titles: Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala and A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates are traditional linear narratives broken into chapters. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander both buck chronology but utilize past tense (Didion) or a mix of past and present (Alexander). Here After’s in-the-moment-but-out-of-order structure is distinctive in its ability to enact the time warp of grief, to make the memories of Kurtis feel more real than Lin’s reality without him.
This effect blurs at the memoir’s conclusion as Lin places vignettes about attending her first writing residency in increasingly chronological order. At first, I resisted this move as disingenuous in its tidiness. But one of the many pleasures of reviewing books is spending enough time with a text that I change my mind. Ultimately, it is no coincidence that this shift in narrative happens while Lin is at a writing retreat. Grief disorients us; writing is one way to organize our experience. (Therapy, I would argue, is another.) The more Lin writes about Kurtis’ death, the more she is able to think and live linearly — to stay, as Kurtis would have, and “seen everything he could.”
Grief’s ability to collapse time is also suggested in Lin’s book title. Most obviously, Here After is a reference to the hereafter, the afterlife. But Lin is also grappling with how to literally be here, after; can she live, when Kurtis did not? She fantasizes repeatedly about dying both passively (deferring a lifesaving stent) and actively (finding a bridge). Spoiler alert: she gets the stent. But not before repeating “you are here” like a mantra during a pre-surgery MRI. The poet in me also couldn’t help but read the title with the homophone Hear After, as Lin describes desperately trying to hear Kurtis’ voice after his death, wondering how he would react to the news of her first short story publication. She even imagines what Kurtis heard after he collapsed on a bridge during the half marathon:
“I read on the internet that the auditory sense is often the last to go. I like to believe this means he heard the water as he went, heard the river running below him, water that is still running now, even though he is no longer.”
Kurtis is no longer, but somehow in the hands of Lin I feel convinced both of his ongoingness and that I know him. In this way Lin offers us another lesson, this time about surviving grief.
On Lin and Kurtis’ first date, they walk by a court building where Lin once contested a speeding ticket. Kurtis, an architect, shows Lin how the building’s ascending glass panels were designed to perfectly reflect the sky. “Seeing him love it,” she writes, “is how I start to love it myself.” After his death, Kurtis’ work lives on. Lin drives to the edge of a plaza he designed called Celebration Square. “Every day,” she writes, “people experience this part of Kurtis that is metal and wood and light. This does not bring me the comfort people seem to think it will.”
Instead, Lin seeks comfort in a different form of construction: writing. She makes this explicit in her book’s epigraph by Louise Bourgeois: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” Lin’s grief impels her to stack her memories of Kurtis into a house that we can also enter. “This was a legacy I could offer Kurtis,” Lin noted in an interview with Electric Lit, “to write who he was or who I knew him to be.” Lin’s talents as a writer of prose are on display as she brings Kurtis’ character into focus with the slimmest details: his aggressively optimistic board game tactics, symphonic laughter, and intense indecision when selecting a flavor of gelato. Kurtis’ joy is easy and contagious, their relationship tender and private. Lin writes that she and Kurtis “shared a language that was all our own. I am now the last speaker of it.” And while we will never be native speakers, Lin gifts us words and phrases from their personal dictionary.
Because we, too, are captivated by Kurtis, we follow Lin willingly into the darkest moments of her grief after his death: ruminating about suicide, nightly sobbing, a searing anger at her chipper coworkers. And it is here that Lin offers us another vocabulary: a language of profound, prolonged mourning in a world that demands our swift return to normalcy after loss. Lin speaks eloquently about the physical and emotional toll of her illness and widowhood. She is no longer able to sleep, work as a teacher, laugh genuinely, attend to others, or imagine any kind of viable future. She quickly discovers that people are terrified of her suffering — even when she attempts to demonstrate what she calls “Good Signs” (putting on earrings, planning a vacation, going out to dinner):
“Everyone is so afraid of grief and this fear is dangerous to the grieving … the painful lesson I am learning: Enduring the thing itself — he is not coming back — is unbearable but denying it is worse, is an even greater, even more insidious, threat to living, if that is what you want to do.”
I do not want to be afraid of grief – not my patients’ and not my own. But putting this bravery into practice is difficult.
“I cannot believe how much we are asked to bear when we are alive,” Lin writes near the end of her book. “How, even if there is a way, no one can show us how to live with it.” But ironically, through her writing Lin does show us. She demonstrates over and over again how to float in the waters of grief without drowning — or pretending we aren’t even getting wet. Both formally and emotionally ambitious, Here After ultimately offers us a remarkable blueprint of survival.
[Published by Zibby Books on March 5, 2024, 257 pages, $19.99 hardcover]