Cartography of Loss

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. Along the journey, readers bear witness through stages of early widowhood, life’s continuance in spite of unbearable grief, and the echoes of losses compounded over a lifetime. 

Exploring how a widow must learn to map out her life in new ways after devastating loss, Paul’s is more than a grief memoir, it’s a clear-eyed, often funny exploration of how loss rearranges a life—and proof that even after the unimaginable, there is a way forward, one essay at a time.