Some experiences are difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't lived through them. In Notes from Planet Widow, Gwen Suesse reflects on the emotional landscape that follows profound loss, exploring the uncertainty, loneliness, and gradual shifts that can emerge when life changes in ways that cannot be undone. This morning, we are joining the book spotlight tour for Notes from Planet Widow by Gwen Suesse! Check out the book, read an excerpt & learn about the author!
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What happens when the life you knew disappears overnight?
Gwen Suesse invites readers into the disorienting reality of grief after the sudden loss of her husband. As familiar routines, assumptions, and plans for the future begin to unravel, she finds herself navigating a world that no longer feels recognizable.
Drawing from her own experience, Suesse examines the many dimensions of loss, including loneliness, fear, anger, exhaustion, and the challenge of redefining identity after a life-altering change. She reflects on the quiet moments that often go unseen by others, the questions that linger without answers, and the emotional contradictions that accompany grief.
Rather than offering a roadmap or simple solutions, the book provides an honest account of what it means to keep living when certainty has disappeared. Through thoughtful reflection and lived experience, Notes from Planet Widow explores how small moments of understanding can gradually help create space for resilience, connection, and the possibility of beginning again.
read an 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.
learn 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.
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