Content Warning: lots of discussion of grief; mention of pet loss.
Also, because grief isn’t linear and time is a lie, this was written over the course of several days and I may note the date something was written.
So, a lot has happened since my last newsletter. I have made blog posts about it, and Instagram posts, but because of the difficult nature of the topics I decided not to send them to my more directly public facing newsletter list (I feel like throwing really sad true stories into people’s inboxes is not ideal), but if you are interested in reading those full stories the posts are on my website. I will address some of it here, but not in detail.
So. What’s going on with me? Well.
It’s been five weeks since I said goodbye to a piece of my heart.
Eight weeks since we lost our sweet marshmallow prince.
But I woke up to an orange October sky and a beautiful rainbow today. [10/7/2025]
Suffice it to say, instead of this being my Summer of Adventure as I had intended, life decided the “adventure” was going to be the emotional rollercoaster of hope and despair, love and loss, finding the strength to do the unimaginable and somehow keep going. But the Ninth House is also the house of spirituality, so it makes sense for my Death year to go the way it has. I was really hoping it wouldn’t because the Death card is rarely literal, but here we are.
My Journey to the Underworld
My spirituality has led me to a lot of interesting places this summer and fall in the hopes of surviving the emotional distress I was experiencing. I think initially I thought, if I could just understand it all on a metaphysical level, or be comforted in the belief in some kind of meaning, or plan, or even my own power, maybe it would help me comprehend it all. Maybe that comprehension would make this all something I could endure. And I was right, in some ways. Deepening my spiritual practices and turning to my faith has eased some of the distress, especially the particular anxieties and pains of pet loss, like unnecessary guilt (it’s so damn common and I hate it. Aren’t we suffering enough?) and wondering if you made the right choices for a loved one who could not tell you what they wanted.
Mainly, though, I have done a kind of spiritual decluttering: I’ve set aside less important aspects of my faith and polished up the old, core beliefs that sit at the foundation of my path–the things I feel I know, even if I can’t prove them: that we are more than our physical bodies; that the stuff that makes us us never dies, only transforms; that at the heart of it all, we are consciousness and intention, not separate from those without form–not even really separate from each other. Maybe that’s more woo-woo than you want from an author newsletter/blog, but if you signed up for the blog of a runcible witch I don’t know what to tell you.
To be fair, grief does feel like you’re going insane sometimes. Maybe I am, or maybe sanity is a lie to begin with and the pain of loss strips away the illusions that distract us from the profound and ineffable. It doesn’t make sense that I can talk to a stranger whose own dog is clearly in her final days and feel nothing but warmth and compassion, but when my brother asks how my writing is going I immediately burst into tears. It doesn’t make sense that my home is my refuge, and yet everything inside of it holds the potential to trigger the spring-trap set around my heart. It’s hard to grasp that the same fog of grief that fills our house can one moment suffocate me, then shape-shift into overwhelming gratitude and love.
It doesn’t make sense, except when you realize it’s all love.
I know we’ve heard it before: some variation of grief is love with nowhere to go. And that has always felt very true to me, and beautiful, and helpful. But this time around, it hasn’t been enough. The idea that my love for Rusty and Luke and those who went before them has nowhere to go feels preposterous, almost unfaithful. I believe now more than ever that we continue on after the body dies. I have seen and felt too much to believe otherwise, both in my life and in this past year. And so long as I have thought, even unconsciously, that my love has “nowhere to go,” my grief has been shattering.
[10/08/2025] But one day this week I woke up and realized that I needed to tell myself a different story about where that love was going—and from whom I could still receive love—and that changed things. The tension in my grief, that almost anxious tremble bouncing between “I love you” and “you are gone” has almost entirely left me. The grief doesn’t feel so devastating now. It feels like the most powerful, pure, unbounded form of love—love that still makes me cry, but because I am so grateful to have it.
Of course, I know that part of grief is the actual physical loss and the ability to be with them and communicate with them. And this is even more true with pets—we receive tactile comfort from them, and pure, unadulterated joy and love just by looking at their faces, or their floofy booties, or their perfect little paws, their wonky little teef, or [insert something you love about your pet here]. We gain a sense of duty and purpose from the act of caring for them. So many people have told me “I wouldn’t be here without my pet.” I am among those ranks.
I don’t really have any wisdom to offer about the physical loss at the moment, except to urge the bereaved to make every attempt to recognize how love transcends all of that. You would have loved them in another form. It is unconditional love, and so it does not require the condition of a body, even. You don’t even have to believe in life after death to realize that.
But that is a lot to truly accept, even for a person like me who lives and breathes this “spiritual” stuff. That leads me to believe that grief is a part of “the plan.” Grief, if we are ready to confront it, strips us down to our barest bones. It is when we are the most human–when humans around us are the most human, too. We see grief, and we want to comfort, connect, support. We feel grief, and we have no choice but to let everything else fall to the wayside (for the sake of this newsletter, let’s ignore the capitalist hellscape that demands we “power through” bereavement, we all know that’s unhealthy). Our needs and priorities become unfettered and clear.
Maybe this is why I have been lurking on r/petloss, offering the small insights I can to help ease other people’s pain as they navigate their own loss. Sharing my experiences and perspective and tiny nuggets of insight with those who need it has been an unexpected form of self care these past few weeks. It’s why I could talk to that old man at the park about his beloved dog–as she lay on a towel on the bench and he radiated the same anticipatory grief that I became so familiar with this summer–and I didn’t feel a twinge of my own grief. All I felt was a soul-deep need to be of some small service to him. And sometimes all you can do for someone is witness them where they are.
Where I’m At
Aside from lurking on Reddit and the very rare check-in on Instagram, I continue to not be online very much for the sake of my mental health, but also because I think social media is ruining the quality of our relationships and how we connect with each other (but mainly because I am SO SICK of being advertised to. UGH). But after a long break to deal with Life, I am writing again. I am working diligently on the next book, which doesn’t have a title yet. I’ve been calling it the monster book (TMB) in my head and in conversation, but it’s definitely not one of those substitute titles that accidentally turns out to be perfect (like Ghost City did, *sigh*). I wasn’t able to write or even focus for a long time, but the words are coming back. The stories. The feelings besides sadness.
For a while, all sense of flowing forward in my life seemed to stop (see my boat metaphor in The Wilderness of Girls). But life is constantly moving forward; the seasons are always changing. As a resident of a city that is mainly known for it’s horrible snow storms, winters have taught me the only way to deal with difficult seasons is to accept them. Do not resist the weather. Bundle up or strip down as you need to. Take advantage of being snowed in as much as a mid-70’s spring day after a six month winter.
Very gradually, foward momentum has begun to return to me. I’ve been reading again. I’ve been curious about things. I’ve started thinking about the future, and new projects, and what’s still possible after 40 (hint: a lot). Most importantly, I’ve been consistently experiencing those little jolts of inspiration and epiphanies that make up the magic of being an author (as well as the mind expanding spiritual epiphanies that make up the magic of being a runcible witch).
[10/9/2025] The grief is still there, but it’s no longer dominant. It is constant, but not crippling. I still cry every day, but more often than not it feels like love, not loss. Of course, the version of this newsletter that I began drafting on October 7 said the exact opposite, so who knows if these two steps forward will be followed by another step back. Grief isn’t linear. I won’t apologize for one moment recognizing that the hole in my heart weighs ten times more than when my heart was whole, and the next moment crying with sheer gratitude that I even got the chance to love them.
All this grief has pointed my creativity in a specific direction, though—almost as if I was waiting for these events before I could fully understand the story I needed to tell. See, I’ve had another book on the backburner for a while. Nothing I’ve officially started, but something I’ve been keeping notes on for a long time, since before I even started The Wilderness of Girls. It started with gathering bones in the forest as I hiked around a hermitage in Upstate NY, and then a book spine that I misread in a tiny private library. It’s evolved from weird poetic musings into a fully formed alternate reality where death is a central focus of life, instead of an uncomfortable topic we tend to avoid confronting until we have no choice, as in our current culture. I’ve had a title in mind for a while, but mainly in my notes I’ve referred to it as “the grief book”, even though thus far there hasn’t even been a whiff of plot, and therefore no one who is grieving. There are notes on themes and even a touch of conflict—but no characters or events to act as vehicles for exploring these things and this world.
I suspect that is going to change in the near future. I don’t know how, but as I process all that I could not control and all that a broken heart means to me—beyond media portrayals of self destruction or romantic devastation—as I hope to transmute even one small grain of my suffering into something that might serve others, I have a strong feeling that this book is where that service will be done.
That’s not to say TMB isn’t also something important and (hopefully) good. It’s funny, and heartfelt, and even has a cute romantic subplot that underscores the main themes. It’s also about the ways we abandon ourselves, in part because we have been so consistently abandoned by the people who are meant to protect us (*ahem, gun control*). It’s about the parts of ourselves that we willingly reject, too—wounds we bury instead of healing; impulses we fear instead of attempting to understand how they’re trying to help us; and how the more we reject the parts of ourselves that are inconvenient to live with, the more powerful—and monstrous—those parts become. And how, when our monstrous parts eventually lash out, we must take responsibility for the damage, even if the wounds that created the monster were not our fault.
TMB is inspired by a lot of things: my favorite picture book, The Monster at The End of This Book; my enduring irritation with people who mock adolescents for their strong and passionate emotions; watching people I have loved self-destruct because they refused confront their own trauma; my own horror as I’ve watched our country continuously fail its children over and over again, ever since the Columbine shooting that happened when I was in eighth grade; also how poorly the adults in my middle school reacted to the Columbine shooting, turning against the students instead of the culture that bred gun violence as a solution to angry young men’s (yes, it’s 99% men) problems. (I can’t recall if I’ve ever publicly posted about that experience, but if/when this book sells I will do a detailed storytime blog.)
I am extremely excited about TMB and hope to have a viable draft very soon. I’m already eager to talk about it, but my ADHD is getting ahead of me because the rough draft is only 60-75% done and I already know I need to go back and change a ton of things. But I’m going on my annual writing retreat with my grad school buddies this week, and I’m hopeful the time away from a house full of memories and time spent with good friends will give me some peace and clarity enough to charge forward on TMB so I can get started on revisions sooner rather than later. Magic happens at these retreats. TWoG would never have been finished if not for these retreats. Not to mention, there will be ocean, and I needs me some salt water right now.
That is all for now, and I hope to not have any major life updates except for positive ones for a very long time. Here’s hoping my next newsletter is a little more joyful, but I hope, in the meantime, there was something valuable for you in this newsletter, too.
May the next few months bring much more peace to everyone than the last few have. [10/10/2025]