✏️🛠️ A Guide to Turning Your Unreal Grief Into Something Beautiful

After her husband, Kurtis, dies inexplicably in his early 30s while on a run, Amy takes to the page to make sense of her emotions—accidentally writing a book in the process.

Image courtesy of Amy Lin; collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

A strange thing happened when I recently hopped on a chat with Calgary-based writer and teacher Amy Lin to talk about her book Here After. The book, published last month, is about her husband Kurtis’s untimely death at the age of 32, and how Amy navigates this immense loss. The loss of her healthy husband who was running a half-marathon when he died. The thing that happened was, I could barely hold it together. I’m not proud of this, and I hoped the whole time we spoke that Amy wouldn’t notice. But she might have, she certainly will now.

Death affects us all in powerful and unpredictable ways. I wanted to be a strong journalist who could speak to Amy objectively about her book, the choices she made, the writing of it, but instead my heart broke for Amy. I had no business being sad while talking to her after what she has gone through, after being able to write about it and speak to me about it, all with such a calm, cool collectedness, but there I was.  

Amy’s writing in her beautiful memoir, which I had just finished reading before we spoke so it was very fresh in my mind, moved me in a way that I’m not even sure I have the words to properly express. Her emotions were so close to the page, yet she wrote with a composure that was somehow both raw and matter-of-fact. The book, which has been praised widely and has appeared on best-of lists on sites like Esquire and Elle, is vulnerable, sharp and so filled with love, it feels like it would be impossible not to cry your way through it. I wanted to know how Amy managed to take her intense pain and turn it into something so moving — she was generous enough to tell me.

Jesse: I know you started a newsletter soon after Kurtis died and I was wondering, is that obviously where this book came from? And if yes, when did you know it was a book and not just a newsletter?

Amy: I started writing the Substack At the Bottom of Everything exactly a month after Kurtis died and I still write in it. And it’s this really beautiful project of grief that was started at the behest of my therapist who insisted that people would need to know how I felt. And that grieving was essentially done as a communal process, which worked against a lot of my instincts to be very private. I am still a very private person, which is an odd thing because I now have a very public pain — it’s a real dichotomy to live in. But I wrote every week in the Substack for two years, and about a year in, my agent called me and said, “Do you think this project is maybe a book?” 

There was no pressure in it, she was just genuinely wondering, but because of who I am — which is to say, I always want to be my agent’s favorite [laughs] — I said, “Yes, I think it is a book.” Which was a lie because I was so in the project of chronicling what my grief experience was like that I hadn’t thought about it.