To anyone who has ever lost a loved one, Abigail Carter offers hope and inspiration with her new book, The Alchemy of Loss. Having lost her husband during the 9/11 World Trade Centre tragedy, Carter was left with a shattered heart and two children under the age of seven to console. She was an expat Canadian living in New Jersey at the time.

Today, seven years later, she invites us to share her journey from devastation to new beginnings. This book chronicles the tumultuous four years Carter spent trying to come to terms with her loss. It was written as a contribution to what Carter felt was a lack of resources for young, grieving widows. It is a book that she herself wishes she had found in her mid-thirties when her husband passed away.

“I hope that by writing this book I am ‘paying it forward’ by helping others who are enduring loss,” writes Carter, “and that they will find this book and be fortified by the idea that grief is ever-changing, and that with a gargantuan effort and by learning to accept the help of family, friends, and neighbours, they too can overcome whatever fireball life has thrown at them.”

In The Alchemy of Loss, Carter copes with being a single parent, learns to start dating again, and eventually moves across the country. It begins with the day of the bombing and ends with Carter’s move to Seattle.

A critical turning point for Carter was her visit to a local psychic named Concetta, through whom she sought to establish some sort of communication with her deceased husband. This was prompted by an unsolicited message from a Toronto psychic which she received through a friend.

“The Toronto psychic’s unsolicited message, real or not, was a turning point for me, settling my tumultuous thoughts about where Arron might be.” writes Carter. “It gave me faith in the afterlife, which in turn eased my fear of death. The message had been simple and yet it freed me from my own thoughts of Aaron’s last moments; it calmed me. It was only natural that I wanted to explore more, learn more about the afterlife in whatever way I could.”

Yet Carter still worried about whether she was making the right decisions: “I was willing to worship at the altar of the psychic if one could offer me peace of mind about the state or Arron’s afterlife. But I worried that I was attaching too much importance to them, in a desperate attempt to hang on to my dead husband.”

The Alchemy of Loss is an incredibly moving, honest, and deeply personal account of a six-year process that includes bodywork, therapy, massage, and meditation. Instead of offering a tidy solution or step-by-step process like most books about grief, Carter admits that there are no easy answers. Every experience is different, and she has generously shared hers. 

The emotions that come through the pages of this book need no dramatization or embellishment. Carter simply tells it as it happened: a raw account of a very personal yet historic event.

Carter likens these years to alchemy, the process by which a substance (usually of little value) is moulded into something of great value. For Carter it was a process of refining, testing, and ultimately renewal. For us it is an inspiration.

And a reason to hope.