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After Effects: A Memoir of Complicated Grief
An intensely moving and revelatory memoir of enduring and emerging from exceptional grief
To grieve after a profound loss is perfectly natural and healthy. To be debilitated by grief for more than a decade, as Andrea Gilats was, is something else. In her candid, deeply moving, and ultimately helpful memoir of breaking free of death’s relentless grip on her life, Gilats tells her story of living with prolonged, or “complicated,” grief and offers insight, hope, and guidance to others who suffer as she did. Thomas Dayton, Andrea Gilats’s husband of twenty years, died at 52 after a five-month battle with cancer. In After Effects Gilats describes the desolation that followed and the slow and torturous twenty-year journey that brought her back to life. In the two years immediately following his death, Gilats wrote Tom daily letters, desperately trying to maintain the twenty-year conversation of their marriage. Excerpts from these letters reveal the depth of her despair but also the glimmer of an awakening as they also trace a different, more typical course of the grief experienced by one of Gilats's colleagues, also widowed. Gilats’s struggle to rescue herself takes her through the temptation of suicide, the threat of deadly illness, the overwhelming challenges of work, and the rigor of learning and eventually teaching yoga, to a moment of reckoning and, finally, reconciliation to a life without her beloved partner. Her story is informed by the lessons she learned about complicated grief as a disorder that, while intensely personal, can be defined, grappled with, and overcome. Though complicated grief affects as many as one in seven of those stricken by the loss of a close loved one, it is little known outside professional circles. After Effects points toward a path of recuperation and provides solace along the way—a service and a comfort that is all the more timely and necessary in our pandemic-ravaged world of loss and isolation.
To grieve after a profound loss is perfectly natural and healthy. To be debilitated by grief for more than a decade, as Andrea Gilats was, is something else. In her candid, deeply moving, and ultimately helpful memoir of breaking free of death’s relentless grip on her life, Gilats tells her story of living with prolonged, or “complicated,” grief and offers insight, hope, and guidance to others who suffer as she did. Thomas Dayton, Andrea Gilats’s husband of twenty years, died at 52 after a five-month battle with cancer. In After Effects Gilats describes the desolation that followed and the slow and torturous twenty-year journey that brought her back to life. In the two years immediately following his death, Gilats wrote Tom daily letters, desperately trying to maintain the twenty-year conversation of their marriage. Excerpts from these letters reveal the depth of her despair but also the glimmer of an awakening as they also trace a different, more typical course of the grief experienced by one of Gilats's colleagues, also widowed. Gilats’s struggle to rescue herself takes her through the temptation of suicide, the threat of deadly illness, the overwhelming challenges of work, and the rigor of learning and eventually teaching yoga, to a moment of reckoning and, finally, reconciliation to a life without her beloved partner. Her story is informed by the lessons she learned about complicated grief as a disorder that, while intensely personal, can be defined, grappled with, and overcome. Though complicated grief affects as many as one in seven of those stricken by the loss of a close loved one, it is little known outside professional circles. After Effects points toward a path of recuperation and provides solace along the way—a service and a comfort that is all the more timely and necessary in our pandemic-ravaged world of loss and isolation.
200 pages, Paperback
Published February 15, 2022
2 people are currently reading
1383 people want to read
About the author
Andrea Gilats
3 books30 followersAndrea (Andy) Gilats is a writer, educator, artist, and former yoga teacher. She is the author of After Effects: A Memoir of Complicated Grief (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and Restoring Flexibility: A Gentle Yoga-Based Practice to Increase Mobility at Any Age (Ulysses Press, 2015), as well as many essays and articles about aging. During her long career at the University of Minnesota, she cofounded and directed the legendary Split Rock Arts Program as well as Split Rock Online Mentoring for Writers. She also directed Encore Transitions, a holistic seminar series for people contemplating retirement, and she taught yoga to a diverse cross-section of older people through her community-based teaching practice, Third Age Yoga.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 27, 2022
My feelings about this read are right there in the title. Complicated Grief.
I think writing about grief is incredibly difficult, not just because you have to dig into those emotions, but also because of how people will relate to it. There is no guide for how to deal with and live with grief. Every person I know who has dealt with grief has handled in completely differently, so it can be difficult to really connect to someone else's grief entirely.
This was absolutely an interesting insight into the author's own personal experience. For me though, it almost felt like I was intruding on her experience. Talking about grief can be opening up the most personal part of yourself, and this author was truly brave on attempting to find the words of describing something so indescribable.
I think writing about grief is incredibly difficult, not just because you have to dig into those emotions, but also because of how people will relate to it. There is no guide for how to deal with and live with grief. Every person I know who has dealt with grief has handled in completely differently, so it can be difficult to really connect to someone else's grief entirely.
This was absolutely an interesting insight into the author's own personal experience. For me though, it almost felt like I was intruding on her experience. Talking about grief can be opening up the most personal part of yourself, and this author was truly brave on attempting to find the words of describing something so indescribable.
December 29, 2022
There are only a few things I could relate to - after all, grief as an experience is so unique to the individual - but that part where she watched the clock for work.. how I hated that too, when that happened to me. When I felt like I was “only” doing a desk job, when I couldn’t infuse my work with the same excitement I always had for it. But she was right, sometimes just the effort to even keep a job is already all that there is, and I held myself to that too. I’ve not even reached the one year mark, but to think that this can stretch to ten, twenty years… I cannot imagine it. I don’t think I can bear it.
* Received by mail, brought with me to Siem Reap
* Received by mail, brought with me to Siem Reap
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April 11, 2024cool
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 5, 2024
True. Grief is a long path to be on. But this person seems to persist staying on it for years. Doesn't have to be that way. Dissapointed in this book.
March 25, 2022
Diagnosis: complicated grief. At least now there are words.
Grief is like a heavy backpack---it never gets any lighter but you get better at carrying it.
Ricky Gervais
Grief is like a heavy backpack---it never gets any lighter but you get better at carrying it.
Ricky Gervais
January 7, 2025
parts are very good
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews