Notes from Planet Widow: Finding My Way After Loss by Gwen Suesse

ABOUT THE BOOK

There are moments in life when nothing looks different to the outside world, yet everything feels different within. In Notes from Planet Widow, Gwen Suesse reflects on the experience of living through profound loss and the slow, often uncertain process of adjusting to a life that no longer resembles the one that came before.

For those who have experienced significant loss, grief is rarely confined to a single moment. It becomes part of everyday life, shaping thoughts, routines, relationships, and even a person’s sense of self. Gwen Suesse offers a candid and deeply personal account of what happened after the sudden death of her husband and the challenges that followed.

As she moves through loneliness, fear, anger, uncertainty, and emotional exhaustion, Suesse explores the reality of rebuilding life without the assumptions and certainties that once felt secure. She reflects on the questions that arise when the future becomes difficult to imagine and the ways grief can quietly alter even the smallest aspects of daily existence.

Drawing from lived experience rather than prescribed solutions, the book creates space for honesty and recognition. Through moments of reflection and understanding, Notes from Planet Widow examines how people continue forward after profound loss, finding their footing not through dramatic transformation, but through small shifts that gradually help make life feel possible again.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gwen Suesse is a writer, certified life coach, and grief support practitioner whose work focuses on helping people navigate life after profound loss and transition. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Wagner College and a master’s degree in teaching from Harvard University, and is certified as a Martha Beck Life Coach, a Creative Grief Support Practitioner, and an administrator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®.

Her professional background spans education, choral conducting, human resources, coaching, and leadership roles in nonprofit and community organizations. She has led workshops and delivered keynote presentations at women’s conferences and charitable events, bringing a thoughtful, experience-based perspective to topics of identity, resilience, and personal growth.

Gwen is the award-winning author of Womansong: Balance and Harmony in a Feminine Key, which explores women’s search for balance and self-realization, and Notes from Planet Widow: Finding My Way After Loss, a deeply personal reflection on rebuilding life after unexpected loss.

She lives in Tryon, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Follow Gwen on her website.

EXCERPT

PLANET WIDOW. A desolate, hostile land. Bleak. Unfamiliar. Foreign. So far away until suddenly it was not; until, like Dorothy, picked up and deposited in Oz by a tornado, I found myself plunked down in a strange barren landscape, overwhelmed by unrecognizable terrain. I was awash in grief, heartache, and disorientation. How could I navigate this unknown land? How could I find my way forward when there was only half of me left to do that?

All I could see was grayness, everywhere grayness, obscured with apparitions of death, visions of loss, and specters of being alone pockmarking the landscape.

For Dorothy, there was a yellow brick road. I saw no roads of any kind or color. No way forward and no safe haven. I was consumed by desolation, loneliness, and cold fear.

That stark, terrifying, hard landing happened years ago. In time the edges softened, the landscape came into focus, and colors reemerged. It is a strange truth that human beings are endlessly adaptable, even when we don’t want to be. We become inured to our situations in spite of ourselves. Surviving grief is as old as humankind. Life does go on. Somehow, we manage to “continue to continue,” as the Simon & Garfunkel song goes.

Initial paralysis slowly morphed into a truce of sorts with this new terrain. Seeing no alternative, I reluctantly embarked on a messy, disorganized, nonlinear process steeped in a brew of grief, heartache, self-doubt, and gut-wrenching loneliness. This process entailed false starts, full stops, unexpected roadblocks, unforeseeable hurdles, periodic rebellions, hand-wringing insecurities, agonizing uncertainties, and all other manner of obstacles and challenges. One day followed another. Somehow life went on.

What makes such transformation possible? Surely Grace—Grace, capital-G—that unmerited, mystical assistance that defies explanation, surely that was at work, carrying me when I could no longer carry myself, shifting my spirit when life had ebbed to its darkest moments, revealing glimmers of hope, difference, love, and possibility.

Examples spring to mind: A friend showing up with a plastic produce bucket full of ice and a bottle of wine. Omnipresent friends—each helping in their own signature way—through phone calls or emails or sharing books or splitting wood for my wood stove. Nature stunning me with her resilience and outrageous beauty as dappled sun sparkled through the trees and onto the stream next to my favorite hiking path, reminding me of Light, Hope, and Buoyancy, hinting that despite everything, joy can still be found. Grace in plain sight alongside the grief, coaxing me inch by excruciating inch to stop staring at closed doors and turn to windows open with possibilities.