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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Today's show is a two-hour special on the mind, highlights from our series Mental Health Mondays. Our next conversation concerns grief and the emotional journey that follows. In August of 2020, Amy Lin lost her husband Kurtis. It was just a few months before their move to Vancouver. Amy was 31 years old and suddenly she had to process being a widow. She wrote a memoir called Here After. It's partly an account of her relationship with Kurtis, memories of a honeymoon in Tokyo, spending Sundays in their pajamas on the couch.

It's also a meditation on what it means to grieve, particularly at a young age. We asked Amy to come on the show to talk about her experience of grief with our listeners for Mental Health Monday. This conversation was guest-hosted by Kousha Navidar. A reminder to our listeners, since this is an encore presentation, we will not be taking your live calls. Here are highlights of their conversation.

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Kousha Navidar: Amy, I'd love to start with Kurtis, and thank you for sharing your story and sharing about him. I loved learning about your late husband Kurtis. We learn in the book that you and Kurtis met on a blind date. Who set that up? What was the date like?

Amy Lin: Thank you. I'm so glad we're starting with Kurtis, who's really the loadstar of this book. He and I were set up on a blind date by a woman who was my neighbor when I was a child. We lived side by side making plant potions together until we were about 10, and then we lost total touch because she moved. As is the kind of nature of childhood relationships people move and they've immediately fallen off the planet. When I was in my early 20s, 24, I ran into her on the street and it had been decades. She said, "Oh my gosh, let's grab coffee," and so we did. It was one of those rare things. We both had the time, and about 10 minutes in she said, "My boyfriend's roommate is perfect for you," and that was Kurtis.

Kousha Navidar: What was he like? What were some of his goals and aspirations in life?

Amy Lin: When I first met Kurtis, one of his main goals was he wanted to grow his hair down to his shoulders. He had this gorgeous head of hair that he loved, and that I truthfully think thrived and was grown longer on words of affirmation. The more people comment on it, the longer it got. He was also in very early years of his practice of architecture. One of his deep passions which we spoke at great length about, he actually took me to a building on our first blind date, was the ways in which the physical architecture of space can actually prepare us to hold better the emotional realities of space. Which is not something I had ever thought about until I met Kurtis. He really turned me towards the brick-and-mortar world and the ways in which it creates emotional space for us in a way that I just had never seen it before.

Kousha Navidar: You talk about emotional space and that creating emotional space, navigating through it, that is a segue to talking about. When you were married and when he unfortunately passed, how long was that time period between those two events?

Amy Lin: Kurtis and I were together all in all just shy seven years. Married a year and a little bit is how I put it. We had very little time in some ways together and other ways we had a kind of time together that feels so vast when I think about it. When I think about how lucky I was to love someone like Kurtis and to be held by him and in so many ways that period of time has completely radicalized and changed my life. I think it's really shown me we tend to, I think sometimes in grief, have different ideas of how much pain a one-year relationship that ends might have.

Or a 55-year relationship that ends how much that might have, but the reality is time doesn't exist in the landscape of grief. The love that is grown regardless of the time between two people will always result in this infinite country of grief and of loss. I'm really grateful for the time I had with Kurtis. I wish there had been more, but there was so much love, of infinite amount of it.

Kousha Navidar: That idea of grief and the experience regardless of how much time you had, both of those things being timeless, if that's a fair way to summarize it.

Amy Lin: Absolutely.

Kousha Navidar: Would you say you understood that before the event? Is that something you learned as a result of it? Were there other things that you learned about grief that you didn't expect through this process?

Amy Lin: That's a beautiful question. I think until I was in it, I had no idea how much we are asked to hold as human beings, how much pain we are expected to be capable of holding. I also didn't fully comprehend until I was in grief and continued to be in it that really grief is the final form of love. It's actually what all of us will do if we love somebody. We will eventually carry them in grief and love them in grief. I think when we societally try to cheer people up when they're in grief, we want them to feel better. That's so human, but it means that we limit their ability to love the beloved who has gone.

When we limit people's ability to speak about or show or even tell you about their grief and their pain, we limit their love in some way. We limit our ability to love in this way. That wasn't something I understood till I was in it. That grief is painful and awful, but it is a part of the beautiful burden that we all bear of loving those of us that have died.

Kousha Navidar: That's beautifully said. If you're just joining us, I'm talking to Amy Lin, who's a writer and teacher. Her memoir, Here After: A Memoir, was published on March 5th. We're talking about the loss that we experience when we become a widow or a widower, and when we lose somebody important in our lives. Amy's husband, Kurtis, was lost about a year and change after they were married. Amy, we got a text from a listener right now that I'd love to read asking for some advice. The text reads, "My best friend lost her husband very suddenly leaving her and their nine-year-old son. What advice can Amy give to a friend on how best to support someone managing such grief?"

Amy Lin: Wow, I really appreciate this question. It's such a beautiful question to say how can I help my friend in grief, and I'm so grateful for it. My advice always is two things. The first would be, there's such a human urge to want to help in a really tangible way. The obvious things of providing food, especially if you have a nine-year-old, so kid-friendly food to help relieve the daily burden of what the grievers will have to process, and that's the child and the partner. Also, I encourage people who are supporting people in grief to witness their friends or their loved one's pain.

Instead of offering them things that might help them feel better, or we think we want to offer to them, offer them recognition. Things like, "I bet you're not sleeping well. You must be exhausted. You must feel like you're the only person in this much pain. You must be so sad." These were things offered to me really early in grief that made me feel so grateful because it allowed me a place to actually say the things that were happening to me. I was exhausted.

I was tired. I was having difficulty keeping things straight. When people allowed me a space to share that with them, they actually entered into my experience with me and they made me less alone. I think grief tries really hard to convince us that we're alone, that we're the only people in this kind of pain, and that other people don't want to know or don't know. By offering griever's witness, I think we offer the best thing any of us can offer anyone, which is a place to be as you are.

Kousha Navidar: Other tools that you've discussed for dealing with grief, there's one part in the book where somebody you're talking to talks about the tools that you have, and everybody has specific tools for you that that tool was writing. You've talked about how people often ask you whether writing was a cathartic experience for you. I'm using cathartic specifically here because you said it's like asking someone who's drowning and receiving a flotation device, whether they thought grabbing the rubber ring was cathartic. Instead, I'm going to ask you, how did writing about the loss of Kurtis keep you afloat and help you process what happened?

Amy Lin: Thank you. That's a so thoughtfully put question. Writing for me is what I have, and we have different things. One person's grief is simply one person's grief. My friend Rebecca, who's in the book, grief symbolically. She does rituals around her grief, which is beautiful and she doesn't write. Writing for me allowed me to create a place, a physical landscape in the vast territory of grief where I could put some of my pain. Where I could draw people to that spot and say, "This is what it's like for me."

It allowed me to hold pain differently because what are books if not places for the past to live. I needed to make a place for myself in grief. Grief totally snapped the narrative of my life. I got married, I am no longer a wife. I'm a narrative that makes no sense anymore. For me, as someone who has writing, I needed to create a space where I could live. I had to rewrite a part of my story. Here After is a large part of that.

Kousha Navidar: Did you know that writing was going to play that role for you? You were a writer beforehand, whether or not you wanted to admit it. Because there's a part of the book where you have a hard time assuming that title, but did you know that writing was going to be this tool for you, or was it organically just the thing that you were drawn to?

Amy Lin: Genuinely, I did not know. I remember when I was in school for writing, I had a few professors share with me that-- they said there will always be a moment when you know you're a writer, and there will be a moment when writing will save who you are. I remember thinking, "That seems overly romantic." I just thought, "That's very grand." That is the truth, I think, when writing is what you have. When my life fell apart, my health failed, Kurtis died, I physically could not move. I really couldn't do anything at all.

There's nothing in the territory of grief that we can do. We have to speak with a new mouth. We have to learn a new language. In that vast unknown that I was going to have to navigate without Kurtis, I just reached for the thing that had always been there, which was my ability to write and to say in writing what things were like. I was grateful that it was there. It's true in so many ways writing like the rubber ring saved who I was in that moment.

Kousha Navidar: That's beautifully said. We're going to take some more calls. On line 1, we've got Pat in Manhattan. Hi, Pat. Welcome to the show.

Pat: Hi. How are you? Hello, Amy. I'm so interested in seeking your book to read. I lost my husband after 39 years of marriage. He was 59. He died suddenly, but horrifically, my daughter passed before him, three months before him, she was 29. I think I was in shock for about a year, but losing my daughter first and then my husband three months later. This is 10 years ago, has taught me an enormous amount about life and grief. The three things I tell people that lose a loved one, whether it's mostly a husband because I'm up an age where a lot of my girlfriends are losing their spouses, and I say, "You're going to be tired.

You're going to be tired all the time and nothing will be the same. Nothing will be the same. You have to re-look at your life now as a completely different storybook than what it was." You were defined by, well, in my case, five people that went to three in a matter of three months. Then the one thing that sticks with me with my daughter who was just brilliant through her illness, she said to me, "Mommy, why are you crying? When you cry, you're really crying for yourself. You're sad because you're missing us. Don't cry. Don't cry because I don't want you to cry." They leave you with these poignant messages all the time. Yes, but I'm looking forward to reading your book.

Kousha Navidar: Pat, thank you so much for that call and for sharing your story and letting us benefit from it. We're so sorry for what you went through. Amy, how does it hear to feel the fatigue that Pat was describing?

Amy Lin: Pat, thank you so much for sharing that. One thing, hearing you, how much loss you hold, I just feel so deeply the land that you live in. Also so much you say it's 10 years ago, how soon that is, how soon that feels to me. It feels so close to me, the loss of your beautiful daughter and husband and it is exhausting. I'm really grateful that you share that with other people in your life because often I think people don't understand that grief is work. That grievers are working so hard to understand this new and impossible reality, and that is so tiring for grievers. Thank you, Pat, for sharing that. I feel really honored to have heard about your daughter and husband.

Kousha Navidar: We have Michael from Franklin. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi. I'm calling because-- let me just preface what I'm going to say to you first because I know how to get through grief. I was very blessed when I took my master's with a teacher who was trained basically, Kübler, was a school teaching grief. I was going through a difficult time because my mother passed at an early age. I know how to do that. What I don't know how to do is, right now, my wife of 44 years is dying, and I don't know how to do this. 44 years of absolute bum beyond anything I could describe. I just don't know how to do this.

Amy Lin: I hear you.

Kousha Navidar: Michael, thank you so much for sharing that for us. We want you to stay on the line if you could, but Amy, I want to direct it towards you. You hear 44 years of marriage. When you are in community with people who are asking, "How do I do this?" I imagine there's no easy answer. How do you navigate that?

Amy Lin: I really hear so keenly that you don't know how to do it. I must have said that a million times, "I don't know how to do this". Especially how do you do it without the beloved who you've always done things with? I really hear that and it's so integral to our experience of grief. My only offering there is to not do it alone, and that I really believe that grief asks of us courage and tenderness and just process that none of us actually can do.

We don't know how to do it and that none of us can move into or through the world of grief alone, and that it is so important to tell people, "I don't know how to do this. I am exhausted, I'm lost, I'm afraid." To allow others to come alongside us and to help us because this is not something that we know how to do. We need others to help show us the way.

Kousha Navidar: Michael, I just want to thank you on behalf of all of us at All Of It for sharing that story. We can hear the pain. Like you said, Amy, sharing and grieving is an act of courage, and we want to thank you very much for sitting in this space with us. Let's go to another caller. We've also got Carol from New York. Hi, Carol.

Carol: Oh, hi. I just want to say I was listening to the program. Congratulations, Amy, on your book. It was something that the author said that really struck me. I lost my husband almost 25 years ago, I was 34 years old. We were together nine years, dated four, married five. Y'all just said something about that time being compressed, it just hit me which was very odd because it's been so long. We lived so much life in those short amount of years when we met and we dated.

We worked together, we lived together. We moved a couple of times. We bought an apartment, we sold an apartment, we got married. We both excelled professionally. We traveled, we made tons of friends. On top of all of that, we were navigating cancer for five of the nine years we were together. I think about that, it was the most jam-packed decade of my entire life. Everything that usually happens over the course of a lifetime happened in those few short years.

Nothing since has ever matched it. We lost friends actually, right before my husband passed away. We lost a few family members. It was extraordinary now to be 60 and looking back on it and to just think of all that happened. I know time is healing and time is all of that and it is true. Now I look back on it and I think it was an extraordinary important part of my life, even though it was only those nine years. Thank you for letting me share that.

Kousha Navidar: Carol, and thank you so much for calling. You talk about the passage of time, and that is a great jumping-off point for a text that we just got with a question for you, Amy, from Michael. "We have many thanks to Amy for giving voice to our shared pain, especially the loss of our identity that accompanied the sudden death." Michael is 61 male and he said that he's the loss of identity that accompanied the sudden death of his wife who's 60 last year.

"For me," Michael writes, "one unexpected challenge has been balancing my own need to find joy in the life and time left to me with the need of others including our young adult children, and our closest friends to commiserate over our shared loss. How does Amy suggest signaling to those close to us that it's okay to experience joy and share it with us as we grieve?" Amy?

Amy Lin: Thank you. That's a beautiful question. What is so misunderstood, I think sometimes about grief, is that we tend to create grief as a binary against joy. We say you can either be grieving or you can be joyful, but we don't necessarily always hold that we are people of the both, that we contain multitudes. There were moments, even ours, or even days after Kurtis died, where there were small moments of joy where a friend gave me a hug and I relaxed into it. Our capacity as human beings is so much more complex than I think we allow when we make grief an opposite to joy.

I would communicate to the people around you that very fact that we all hold all kinds of emotions and states of being all the time. That it does not diminish the deep grief and the painful loss that you have had to experience joy. That rather we are all made fuller and more human when we acknowledge that our incredible grief absolutely lives in the same body that houses deep joy. We do a greater credit to both pain and to both joy when we give them fullness in the same space.

Alison Stewart: That was a conversation between guest host, Kousha Navidar, and Amy Lin, author of the memoir Here After. That's the end of our show for Today, a two-hour Mental Health Monday special. If you'd like to hear more from the series, go to wnyc.org and search All Of It. Tomorrow we continue with another series, Get Political, with the author of a new book, The Quiet Damage QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate your listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.