A Young Widow Rewrites the Conventional Narrative of Grief

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 biological aspect, and there are moments in the book I referred to in my notes as the “science of grief.” For example, you search the term “young windows” and read a report that lists mortality rates—cardiac arrests, cancer, suicide—of widows compared to those still married. In fact, soon after Kurtis’ death, you ended up in the hospital with life-threatening blood clots. To me, typically, grief is talked about as an emotional state, not a physical response. Was learning these facts helpful—to have an explanation for what you were feeling not just emotionally, but physically? 

AL: I will say until I was in acute grief, I thought of grief as an emotional state. But in Calgary, where I live, we have the Bob Glasgow Grief Centre, which is the only provincially and publicly funded grief counseling center in all of Canada. And so, I was really lucky because I live here and started it within a month of Kurtis dying. 

The first session was just an hour with a slideshow where the grief counselor talked about was the ways in which grief affects the body. She said grief completely shutters the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that does communication and memory and scheduling and emotional regulation. The blood is being poured from that part of your brain into the base of your brain, which deals with fight or flight, with survival, and with “am I going to stay alive?” That whole part of your brain, the front, at a blood level, has gone dark. She said I was in clinical shock. 

JJ: Actual clinical shock?

AL: Yeah, and she also explained neurologically, your brain has not caught up to your reality. She explained that when we meet somebody, we code neural pathways in our mind. We have a neural pathway for ourselves, the person we think ourselves to be. And then the brain codes a “you” that is separate from the “you” that is real. Let’s call that second “you,” Kurtis. But then as you continue to live with that, the brain starts to encode a third entity. Which is the “you” in combination with Kurtis, the “we.” She said, obviously, Kurtis has died, but the neural pathways that you have for him are still being used. And the brain is not just trying to cope with permanently shutting down the neural pathways connected to the “you” that is Kurtis. It’s dealing with the entanglement of the two yous, the “we,” and the brain has no idea how to shut that down because the real you” isn’t dead. And because the brain is trying to shut it down, a lot of people have a feeling of “I’m dying.” And she said that’s actually true biologically, because the brain is trying to kill the neurological you.

Also, how much capital the brain is using biologically is massive. She said that’s why grief, biologically, is actual work, and extremely tiring. This is what creates the “widow effect.” It’s not that you’re cursed. It’s that you’ve been exposed to intense levels of stress hormones over such a long time that you are more vulnerable to disease, more vulnerable generally. With your prefrontal cortex down, you tend to take more risks. And so that’s what creates this trackable data about people who are widowed, especially young, who tend to have health problems, or accidents happen to them, because they really take more risks. Like, this is how you get hit by a car, because you’re not actually evaluating, “Oh, is that car traveling too fast? I’m going to dash across the street.”

After I understood what was happening in my body, when something would happen, or I’d feel a certain way, I was able to know I wasn’t crazy, this was my brain working. So, I had that, and I felt lucky. But also, we’re failing people in that they don’t have access to this information. Where is this in the health curriculum?

JJ: You clearly, at least now, have a way to speak about grief. And I wanted to talk about the language of grief. Do you think grief has its own language? Is our language around grief limited? 

AL: I do. And I think, yes, our language around grief is limited. One way is by this desire to make people feel better. Culturally, I think, humanly, we do not want to see our fellow people in pain. We want to make them feel better. And this is where I think, with most people, because of their good intentions, the language that they use is always forced towards healing, towards “cheer up,” towards the “bright and shiny.” The language we have for grief is about either distracting people from it, or helping them feel better generally. And while that comes from a really human and understandable place, grief studies show it’s harmful to people who are grieving because grief is chronic pain. It doesn’t go away. 

Saying to someone, “I’m going to distract you from the fact that your husband died,” is kind of like saying, “I’m going to ask you to hold your breath.” And then asking, “Don’t you feel better?” And you’re like, no, that’s actually really hard for me. Because something that is essential and omnipresent in my life, you’re now asking me to forego. And it becomes really harmful for people who are grieving to have to perform that they’re not sad. Or to perform that you’ve made them feel better. But it’s also hard to educate gently, especially when you just want to say, “If you want to help me, please just sit with me in my sadness.”

And then the second part where I see us limiting language around grief comes from, I think, a North American narrative of resilience, the bootstraps mentality, the “you’re so strong.” I think people see it as kind of cheerleading, truthfully. But again, it really just puts a griever in a place where there’s no space for them, and nobody feels strong or resilient. They feel afraid. That’s how they feel, and I think we linguistically really harm people.

JJ: I want to switch tones because I want readers to know the book isn’t all sad. There are beautiful and tender snapshots that depict the love you and Kurtis shared while he was alive. Moments where I found myself both laughing and simply admiring the wonder of your relationship. And you write that Kurtis once said that you think “sadness has a kind of beauty.” So, my question: Did you also experience moments of joy in the remembering, in particular the good? And if not joy, something else? In a book that centers grief, how did you approach infusing the book with these moments? 

AL: I love this question. The real answer is that I did not experience joy writing this book. I found it extremely painful to live in. I didn’t come to this book to write about grief. I realized that it was a way of processing grief, but I didn’t intend to do that. But you grieve with the thing that you have, and the thing that I have is writing. Something beautiful about writing is that it creates a legacy, even if that legacy is small. Even if that book is read by very few people. It’s still its own kind of legacy. And this was a legacy I could offer Kurtis—to write who he was or who I knew him to be. And so, I came to it to write about him and to write about our life. 

I am extremely private, a lot of the inner texture of our love and of our life was private. But I wanted to open the doors that I had kept closed when we were together. We shared something that was so rare and so beautiful to me that I fiercely protected it in the world when he was alive. And then when he died, I wanted to connect people to the person and the love that he shared and who he was. And writing it felt like one of the things I could do for him. I think the strange thing for me, and is probably, neurologically, entwined with the idea of Kurtis, is that I can do this ghostly math of how Kurtis would feel in certain situations. I knew him so well that I knew how he felt when I wrote those sections you mention.

So, while I did not experience joy, Kurtis was somebody who led with joy, and who led with levity. And so, the reason that those sections, I think, flare brightly in the text, is because I’m writing from the piece of myself that loved him. Because I’m not bright like that. I’m quite serious and pretty anxious, you know? But Kurtis had his own sun, his own gravitational pull. And when I wrote in that mode, I really tapped into that. And that is what I tried to bring to the page. That’s where the moments of the joy in the book come from. The lens of that was him. 

JJ: Speaking of writing, on your first date with Kurtis, you introduced yourself as a substitute teacher. Later, after discovering and reading your blog posts, Kurtis basically says that introduction was wrong, and calls you a writer, says you are a writer, which you hesitate to accept. A lot of writers get asked the question, “When did you first call yourself a writer?” But not many get asked what it’s like for someone, especially someone they love, to call them a writer first, to see it in them and claim it for them, even before they claim it themselves. Can you tell me what that felt like—to be identified as a writer by Kurtis—especially now that you have a book? 

AL: I think maybe one of the greatest things that we can do for the people we love is to endeavor to see them. And I don’t mean see the best parts of them or the parts of them that we would like to highlight or the parts of them that we would like to encourage in them. I mean, to actually see who they are in the fullness of the person that they are. And when you see something in someone that is so core to who they are, and you see it before them—and also before that person is able to accept it themselves—that’s one of the greatest things, to live in the abundance of somebody’s sight like that.

Kurtis loved me in that way. Loved me enough to see immediately that I was a writer and say that to me. Our first date was very long, six hours. And later, when he found those blog posts, he said, “You were charming and open and engaging on the date, but you were not like this. You were not open like this. I met you on these pages in a way I didn’t meet you in person.” He certainly saw something in me and that remains, probably, the most radical reality of my life. That Kurtis saw me and, in doing so, excavated a knowledge about something that I am before I did, and then held it to the day that he died. 

JJ: That’s beautiful. You also write fiction, and there’s a scene in the memoir where you describe publishing you first short story in a journal and imagine how Kurtis would have celebrated were he still alive. If you believe in the After, how do you imagine he’s celebrating the publication of your debut book? 

AL: I think what’s so amazing is even if you don’t believe in an After, which truthfully, I’m not sure that I do, what do I believe in is Kurtis. There is this beautiful thing about our loved ones, and our ancestors, whoever that is for us, and it’s that they show us “the way.” And often the way is into a more tender or expansive way of living, which is certainly true for me of Kurtis. He showed me the way into a more light-filled, joyous way of living. He really was a man who loved living. And it’s crazy to me that he got so little time to do it. And so, despite my ambivalence about the After, I, because I knew Kurtis for as long as I did, can so fully feel that if there is one, then he’s going crazy in it. When I turned 30, he filled his car so full of balloons he got into a car accident because he couldn’t see out of it. So, if there’s an After, and there’s finite space he could fill, then it’s filled. And I know that that would be true, if it can be true. And if it is true, then Kurtis will show me the way.