Letters to Kate
Life after Life
-
- $22.99
-
- $22.99
Publisher Description
Sorrow is “not a state but a process” that needs “not a map but a history. . . . There is something new to be chronicled every day,” writes C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed. When Carl Klaus’s wife of thirty-five years died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage, right before Thanksgiving in 2002, he took the only road toward recovery that made sense to him: he started writing letters to her, producing a unique history of grief, solace, and love. His vivid and thoughtful letters will resonate with everyone whose loss confronts them with emotional, psychological, and philosophical questions for which there are no easy answers.During his first year without Kate, Carl writes himself into the life that comes after the life he loved. From days of grief in the darkness of a midwestern winter, to springtime, with a return to life in the garden and a memorial service for Kate on a sunny afternoon, to fall, with a pilgrimage to their favorite vacation spot in Hawaii, Carl documents his year-long experience of remembering, meditating, and evolving a new life. Individually his letters provide the insights of a master diarist; collectively, they have the arc of a master essayist. Recording the full range of mourning from intense shock to moments of exceptional affirmation, Klaus’s stories and reflections on loss bear witness to universal truths about the first and most significant year of mourning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A retired University of Iowa English professor, Klaus (Taking Retirement) offers a dreary, languid account of emotional management during the year of grief following his wife's sudden death. In touching letters to Kate, 60, his wife of 35 years who died of a massive hemorrhage upon returning one November day to her Iowa City home after an art fair, the author reveals his small, diurnal acts of evoking and preserving her memory. After the initial shock of Kate's death (she was 10 years his junior and a cancer survivor), Klaus describes being haunted by her effects: her clothes, her abandoned garden, her missing will. With his children grown, he is left to face Christmas largely alone, reviving Kate's memory to whoever will listen. He finds he drinks too much and overeats as compensation for her absence at dinner parties, then is rebuked eerily by her in his dreams ("How can you let yourself get like that, when I'm doing everything I can to keep you alive?" she chides him). Klaus's diary culminates in the triumphant May memorial service he plans, and his eventual execution of their long-postponed trip to Hawaii in order to spread Kate's ashes there. And despite his feelings of betrayal, the author does find companionship again.