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.
