Cartography of Loss: A Widowhood in Essays

For fans of Jenny Lisk’s Future Widow, a tender memoir-in-essays about rebuilding after losing a spouse to brain cancer, Cartography of Loss explores caregiving and reveals how life after loss reshapes everything, even new love. When her husband is diagnosed with glioblastoma, Karen Paul becomes a full-time caregiver overnight. Their marriage, the landscape of which had always shown fractures, is instantly and radically transformed. Years after the long vigil of illness and his death, Karen faces the uneasy recalibration that follows and a new identity she never asked for: widow. Told in three parts, Cartography of Loss chronicles the very particular and personal—from hospital corridors and hospice visits to tattoos and the strange circumstance of falling in love again.