Forthcoming September 2024 / Cantando Press
Planet Widow: Finding My Way After Loss is the story of how a grieving woman painstakingly found her way through the alien territory of widowhood.
Life was rolling along largely in the way my husband and I expected it would. Ups and downs here and there, for sure, but basically on a mostly predictable trajectory. But on an August day I will never forget, our normalcy vaporized with the sudden death of my beloved husband. Boom! Without warning, I landed on Planet Widow, an utterly barren landscape with no roads, no buildings, no people, no trees, no anything in sight – only total desolation with mind-bending disorientation and soul-piercing heartache as my sole companions.
I had no vision of what life could look like in such a place. Slowly, however—oh, so agonizingly slowly—a landscape began to take shape. Signposts came into focus to reveal a path forward. Insights built on each other to form a trail of breadcrumbs that I used to hold myself together as I learned a new way of being.
Planet Widow is a story of rebirth, describing the trail of insights that knit themselves together to restore my sense of wholeness within an altered context. While I couldn’t totally eradicate grief, I could learn profound lessons from it. Finding the courage to be open to it as a fierce teacher, I slowly lived my way into a new realization of self that includes grief, transforming disorientation into grounding and a measure of peace.
Select Advance Praise
“A loving, gracious invitation to a land that is ever so difficult to traverse.”
– Geneen Roth, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Women Food and God and her most recent book, This Messy Magnificent Life
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“Notes from Planet Widow is no less than a guidebook for handling grief. Any kind of deep grief. There’s nothing precious or saccharine in the wisdom Gwen offers. She offers the truth, which happens to be just as painful as it is filled with grace. She models a beautiful way forward.”
– Kelley Weber, Spiritual Director, Aspiralspace.com
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“Notes from Planet Widow is written in an informal style that is filled with rich descriptive metaphors. Reading this book is to have a gentle conversation with Gwen. She is transparent in her coming to terms with the loss of her husband, Jack. The documentation of her journey provides the reader practical information, resources, and illustrations that serve as a graceful guide through the angst, pain, and loneliness of the loss of a love.”
– Jackson Rainer, Ph.D., ABPP, Board Certified Clinical Psychologist, psychotherapist, educator, author, and expert in the areas of grief and bereavement, and end of life and palliative care.
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“In Notes from Planet Widow, author Gwen Suesse reflects on her experience with grief after the sudden death of her husband, Jack. Using the lens of deep grief, she takes us through her experiences with hope, anger, loneliness, and myriad other emotions as illustrated by poignant memories and reflections on her own moments of deep meaning-making after loss. Through shifting perspectives and embracing the present, the author found ways to thrive and find joy again. From there, she shows us not necessarily one right way – because there isn’t only one right way – but a path from which we can learn and tools to explore along the way.”
– Tamara Beachum, Grief Educator
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“This insightful work narrates Gwen’s journey of grief and grace in widowhood. Quoting myriad writers, sages, philosophers, poets, and more, it blazes with personal and universal understandings . . . As a stand-alone, the Resources section at the end is an invaluable tool to help readers pursue their own journeys of self-compassion and acceptance.”
– Sara J. Glerum, beatstalkingtomyself.com
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“This book is deep, curious, and full of wonder… It is a gifted piece of writing…. sometimes difficult yet elevating to read. Wise and wonderful.”
– Leigh Steiner, Ph.D., Former Illinois Commissioner of Mental Health
Pre-order Available
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THE FACT that I am writing this introduction is proof that people can and do survive loss. When loss hit me, I wasn’t sure I’d live through it, but I did, and you will, too.
Loss is as old as humankind. And human beings have evolved to be able to endure it, to survive it, and even thrive in its wake. That’s the good news.
The bad news—might as well be honest, right from the start—is that we never get over it. Our lives are forever altered. There are times when we don’t think we can endure the loss, when we’re not sure we even want to.
Although my story unfolds in terms of widowhood, the feelings and situations I have experienced (and am still experiencing) with this seismic shift seem remarkably similar across all forms of loss, whether sparked by the death of a spouse, parent, child, or beloved friend; or the loss of a job, a family, a home, or a life irreversibly altered by illness. Loss of any kind is disorienting. It erases the illusion of having control over the arc of our lives. It guts our sense of normalcy. It undermines security and rips asunder our expectations.
From the start, I longed to put grief in my rearview mirror, but great loss is an abiding ache that defies eradication. Like salt in the sea, some memories never leave our bones. They become part of us, so we must learn how to carry them. Thrust on a journey I didn’t anticipate and certainly didn’t choose, the only choice remaining was how I’d respond. Would I pursue a path of reintegration or remain in the parking lot of despair?
I chose to claw my way out of that parking lot. I chose to keep moving.
My beloved husband died when I was sixty-two, young enough to feel like any such loss, while statistically likely, was years away. Without warning that mindset evaporated. Jack was gone. His death occurred just thirteen days after initial symptoms of shortness of breath. Instantaneously, the ground beneath me disappeared and I landed on “Planet Widow.”
I had to figure out how to navigate without a road map.
Soren Kierkegaard observed that life can only be understood backwards, although it must be lived forwards. I found “living forwards” to be fraught with one roadblock or pothole after another: the oppressing presence of absence. The unfathomable sorrow of a house that echoes with the silence of having no one to talk to. Brewing coffee in the morning and realizing only half as much is needed.
Trying to start the generator during a power failure and needing to call the electrician because I failed to flick one critical switch. Electrically controlled clerestory windows that opened by themselves.
(Really! Turns out the wind had stripped the gears, meaning that outside air pressure could cause them to open, but I thought I was losing my mind.) Legal issues with all the exacting protocols they entail.
Our corgi, Daisy, knowing somehow that Jack was gone and behaving badly to punish me for that by failing to wait to go outside to do what dogs do when she never ever had “accidents” prior to this time. One uncontrollable thing after another, day after day after day.
So many details were demanding expertise, attention, and energy at a time when my fuel gauge was already running on empty, my knuckles already white from desperately clutching the steering wheel.
Desperate to find direction, I did what I always do:
I wrote.
I wrote, hoping that “thinking on paper” would show me my path as it has done so often over my lifetime. Looking back over journal entries years later, a path of breadcrumbs had emerged, subtly and slowly, one tiny morsel at a time. Easily overlooked individually, but as they accumulated, a way forward came into focus and gathered energy.
To be clear, no magic formula for obliterating sadness, loneliness, and despair magically appeared along the way. However, even in the midst of darkest gloom, acts of kindness, dapples of light, scraps of humor, and smidgens of hope beckoned to me from the distance, coaxing me forward.
This is my story, colored by my specific circumstances, but its revelations and lessons can, I believe, be applied to a broad spectrum of loss experiences.
PAST WORK
Womansong addresses a basic question that haunts reasonable, thinking, caring women: “How can I be a daughter, a wife, a friend, a mother, a worker/professional, and still find time, energy, and space – both actual and spiritual - to be ‘me’?” The question is omnipresent; answers, however, are elusive. How can we keep the best parts of traditional feminine roles while concurrently claiming our right to make decisions about our own destinies?
While Womansong’s themes are universal, its approach is unique. The book fuses ideas and insights about feminine balance and harmony, combining anecdotes, quotes, sociological background, art, imagery, spirituality, stories, observations, and reflections to invite readers to “sink their teeth” into ideas about the common elements in women’s situations while also offering the opportunity to reflect on how these concepts play out in their own lives.
By design, Womansong’s rich, intricate layers - told in a series of musical metaphors - are complex, just as women’s lives are complex. And yet, a simple, lingering melody flows throughout the book, inviting women to “sing their own songs.”