Bookends with Mattea Roach23:20Amy Lin: Widowed at 31, she looks for the beauty in grief
In her debut memoir Here After, Amy Lin tells her and her husband Kurtis’ powerful love story — and shares how she copes with his sudden death.
With honesty and raw emotion, Lin explores how Kurtis’ death upended her ideas of grief, strength and memory.
“It’s a searing portrait of grief and a beautiful tribute to the love that Amy shared with her husband,” said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their interview on Bookends.
Lin is a Calgary-based writer whose work has been published in Ploughshares. She has received residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. Here After was on the 2024 shortlist for $75K Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Lin joined Roach to discuss the intensity of grief, the widowhood effect and the reality of life after death.
Mattea Roach: Can you tell us a bit more about Kurtis?
Amy Lin: He really carried his own sun with him. He was an expansive person who welcomed the world right to his door. I think that’s a really rare and uncommon quality in a person.
He really carried his own sun with him.– Amy Lin
It was something that continues, truthfully, to enchant me to the kind of person that he was. I feel really lucky to have had such a clear and full understanding of the person that Kurtis was and to be able to carry that.
MR: I want to talk about Aug. 15th, 2020 that you described so vividly in the book. It’s the early part of the pandemic and Kurtis is going out to run this half marathon with some members of your family. Could you share with us a bit about what happened from that moment?
AL: Kurtis was a track athlete growing up. He’s just always fantastically fit in a way that sometimes I thought he didn’t deserve, you know? They went to run in the mountains of B.C., where they were on vacation with my family, and I couldn’t run because I had injured my knee. And so I was home, and Kurtis left and I just waited.
Kurtis was less than 1,000 metres from the house. I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew it when my dad came through the door.
Kurtis collapsed on a bridge. When I spoke to the coroner, she explained to me that he had suffered some sort of massive organ failure, likely his heart, and the death would have been instantaneous. So whatever kind of physical going there was, at least it wasn’t painful — for Kurtis, I guess.
People are so unprepared in some ways for death. Even hospitals — we were in the British Columbia mountains in a very small town. No one had died there for a very long time. So when I look back and think about it, so many people there were unprepared. That’s something, as I continue to walk forward from that day, that I continually realize that we all know that we’re mortal, but we don’t walk around thinking that.
On that first day, I was surprised by how surprised everybody was.– Amy Lin
I walk around daily with an awareness of how thin the veil is. That really does change how I move through the world and I think it changes for most people when they come very close to death, but on that first day, I was surprised by how surprised everybody was.
MR: I’ve heard from various people that I’ve spoken to who have gone through the acute grief of losing a spouse or a sibling or a parent, the body can react in a lot of very strange ways that you wouldn’t really expect. So ten days after Kurtis passed away, you’re in the hospital, you have deep vein thrombosis. You have these clots in your legs and your lungs. I’m wondering whether you feel that there’s a connection at all between grief and just physical health.
AL: I believe that the body holds so much of her pain. But when it comes to my health failing so shortly after Kurtis died, I think it’s bad luck. It’s a really interesting thought, because we know about the widowhood effect, and I write about this, which is that there is this clinical reality that if you experience young or out of time loss you are more susceptible to things that seem random but are in fact not — things like cancer, car crashes, house fires, being struck by lightning.
There are so many threads when you read the studies that feed into the widowhood effect. One is that yes, the body literally holds more of the bad chemicals. Cortisol is so high in the body when you grieve, it corrodes the body. And the reality is that you are biologically more susceptible to disease because of that corrosion. But there are also these other physical realities that the grieving have — impaired physical processes, particularly when it comes to evaluating risk. It seems like getting struck by lightning would be very random.
People who have experienced young loss experienced these kinds of crises in much higher numbers than other people.– Amy Lin
People who have experienced young loss experienced these kinds of crises in much higher numbers than other people. They go walking in storms that other people wouldn’t because they actually have impaired abilities to evaluate risk.
So to the question of my own health failing, I don’t know if it was a manifestation of grief, but I think that I ignored physical pain in my body because it seemed so inconsequential when held against the context of my emotional pain.
My parents were the ones who insisted that I go to the hospital. I had so many clots in my lungs and in my legs that you get the “bad face.” You know, when the doctor comes back and they have the “bad face.” In some ways, they couldn’t believe that I had taken so long to come into the hospital because of the kinds of pain that I was in. So in that way, I think, my health failing in the way that it did was related to grief, because grief recontextualizes everything.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
This post was originally published on here
