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Amy Lin, Here After, Zibby Books, 2024, 272 pgs.
My dad became a widower in his late thirties. I was born a few years after that, a year after he remarried. But the memory of his first wife never left him or our household. Her artwork decorated our walls, and her relatives became ours. Every summer on our car trips from Chicago to the east coast, we would stop in Pittsburgh to visit my fatherโs friends from his first marriage. My lesson in all of this is that when a spouse passes away, especially at a young age, it doesnโt mean the person is gone from their life.
I hadnโt found many other examples of this way to mourn and rememberโto keep the other personโs memory aliveโuntil I picked up Amy Linโs stirring new memoir, Here After. She was even younger than my fatherโin her early thirtiesโwhen her husband suddenly passed away. After reading her book, I canโt think of a more heartfelt way to remember a young spouse.
Linโs structure is special. She writes in a vignette style with an alternating chronology. And in a podcast interview she said that she took the most important parts of a vignette and placed them in a text box on each page, so she ended up keeping only the most pertinent parts of each vignette. This sparse style is especially fitting for a grief memoir because it gets to the heart of her story in a way that could get lost in longer prose.
Lin meets her husband Kurtis on a blind date in Calgary when theyโre both in their early twenties. They both come from Asian backgrounds, her father Chinese, and his mother Japanese. After dating for four or five years, they marry and honeymoon in Japan. Lin writes about a premonition on their honeymoon.
In Tokyo, we visit the Sensoji temple and its markets. The corridors are so packed with people that he and I walk in front of each other. When we find the stall where we can draw fortune papers from a wooden box, we do. His is bad, so he lets it go. Mine is good, so I keep it.
At other temples in Japan, Kurtis continues to draw bad fortunes. Neither of them thinks much as about this, but Lin will remember it once Kurtis dies suddenly on a long-distance run in August 2020. His death comes out of the blue and even after autopsy results are returned eight months later, there still is no reason to expect a healthy thirty-three-year-old might die so suddenly.
The pandemic is raging around the world and there are restrictions everywhere, including hospitals. Very soon after Kurtis dies, Lin herself is hospitalised with blood clots that resulted from an electric scooter fall shortly before Kurtisโs death. Her hospitalisation adds to her grief, loneliness, and isolation. Itโs unbearable to go through such rigorous treatment as a young widow.
Therapy, video chats with a friend, and a new puppy help Lin manage her grief, but only barely. She learns that the five stages of grief do not apply to the griever. On an online post, she finds answers to how long her grief could last. There are hundreds, including:
It doesnโt end.
It wonโt stop.
You think about it all the time.
It never ends.
It is always with you.
It doesnโt quit.
It never goes away.
Everyone finds different ways to grieve, but the grief itself really never goes away. Linโs book is special because she writes in the present tense so the reader can understand her thoughts at the time, so soon after Kurtisโs death. Joan Didion tackled grief in The Year of Magical Thinking, which recounts the year after her husband died. Lin also includes this first year, but the way she shows the before, during, and after seems more compelling and will ultimately help others better deal with their own grief.
Iโm happy to see that Lin and Here After are receiving great press in the United States. The book was chosen as a Book of the Month pick in March and made the USA Today Best-Selling Booklist. Amy Linโs book is one of the best memoirs and books about grief that Iโve read. I know my father would have appreciated it too.
How to cite:ย Blumberg-Kason, Susan. โTo Mourn and Remember: Amy Linโs Here After.โย Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Apr. 2024,ย chajournal.blog/2024/04/04/here-after.
Susan Blumberg-Kasonย is the author ofย Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong.ย Her writing has also appeared in theย Los Angeles Review of Booksโ China Blog,ย Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. She received an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Blumberg-Kason now lives in Chicago and spends her free time volunteering with senior citizens in Chinatown. (Photo credit: Annette Patko) [Susan Blumberg-Kason andย ChaJournal.]