THE FIFTH CHAMBER by Anne Gudger: Exclusive Excerpt

September 7, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

THE FIFTH CHAMBER, Anne Gudger

Annie is pregnant with her first child and married to the love of her life. Then on one fateful night, her husband dies in an accident and Annie is left alone. Now Annie must navigate the trials of single motherhood, mourning, and learning to love again. Crafted with lightning bolts of joy and sorrow, The Fifth Chamber is a tender and lyrical memoir about the dance of loss and life, and how grief can make the heart beat stronger than ever before.

EXCERPT

CHAPTER 30 After

Do things get better after the first year? I asked my widow posse with the first anniversary of Kent’s death hiding in the corners, looming, with my double-down grief body aches: headaches, heavy shoulders, heart thumping, not THUMPING. My stuffing unstuffed like the early days.

They checked the ceiling, checked their shoes for a beat.

Later they told me: Here’s what people don’t say. The second year becomes the first anniversary of your first year losses. The second year you spend time remembering how you navigated the first year, thinking about how now it’s your second year of missing the big dates, the small dates. They didn’t say those words until I crawled through the first-year anniversary. As that mountain anniversary tracked closer, they said: We’re here. We love you.

A year without the love of my life.

Are you better? people asked.

(Please tell me you’re better.)

How’d you do it? people wondered.

(Please tell me in case I ever need to know.)

Are you over it? Have you healed? The questions under the questions.

No.

I don’t know.

No.

Actually, fuck no.

You don’t get over grief. It’s not the flu. Your heart grows around your grief. Your heart fills in the cracks, those cracks that let the light shine through. You become your own kintsugi piece.

You get up. You get knocked down. In day light. In night light. You think endlessly about your beloved until you realize you didn’t think about them one whole day. Crap! Then you double down on remembering. You learn to lean into the people holding you up. You find new people you can circle with. You make micro moves to let the story you wanted melt to the background, live in shadow as you wonder about the story you have, as you begin to let your new story be most alive, as you step into who you are in the After, as you realize widowed is what happened. It’s not who you are.

That first anniversary?

It unstitched me. Until it didn’t.

I spent it in the arms of Mom and sisters. I spent it thigh to thigh with the women who loved me best.

Sisters brought things Kent liked: German chocolate cake, rum balls, cherry Coke. Of course there were M&Ms, my favorite grief food. Sweet, crunchy, smooth little pebbles, that faint clicking sound they made when I ran my hand through them. Lisa brought them in a gift bag that felt bottomless. Hello friends.

I placed Kent’s running shoes by the front door where he’d left them, untied. His tea mug on the kitchen counter. I filled it with chamomile tea and let it cool. I’d recycled the last newspaper he read or I would have pulled it out too. I took some weird comfort in the details, restaging objects like they were his last day, like I left them for months as though he’d step back into his Nikes.

Excerpt reprinted with the permission from the publisher

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Anne Gudger is a Portland writer who loves language and space on the page. She writes about love and loss and how we get from there to here. She’s fascinated with the heart and its metaphorical fifth chamber that holds more love, that holds shadows. She’s been published in Real Simple Magazine, The Rumpus, Slippery Elm, NAILED Magazine, Entropy, Tupelo Press, Atticus Review, The Timberline Review, Columbia Journal, Sweet Lit, Cutbank, Cutthroat, The Normal School, and elsewhere. It’s been said that Anne eats books and has since she first decoded words.