If you were to believe popular culture, and it’s chock full of alluringly escapist ideas about how life should be so why the hell wouldn’t you, you can experience the most resoundingly destructive romantic grief, and then not much later, by dint of a meet-cute, the exchange of a few wittily-inspired words and an undeniable instant connection, find healing with someone new who reshapes your broken world for the better.
When you are lost in the fog of grief and pain that follows losing that one special person who centred, made sense of your life and through everything, and I mean everything, made sense, the idea that you can have it all back and in picture perfect Hollywood style, sounds like a dream come true.
But that fact is that even if that magical someone comes along, it likely won’t be straight away, and even if it is by some miracle, you won’t be in a position to do much about it.
Not at first, at least; grief is unpredictable and long and in The Last Love Note by Emma Grey, we are given empathetically beautiful but heartwrenching ringside seats to what it feels like to lose the absolute love of your life, to have your heart and soul crushed and ripped to shreds as your world viciously implodes and to wonder if you’ll ever be able to put any of it back together again.
‘He stays dead,’ I whisper.
Even though they’re barely audible, Hugh catches my words. Holds them.
‘He keeps on not coming back,’ I continue, as if discovering this truth for the first time. Hearing my own words, I start to panic. So much of my grief has been about Charlie losing his dad. Nowhere near enough of it, I realise now, has been about me losing my husband. It’s like I’ve woken up on the crest of a roller-coaster I didn’t know I’d boarded, I’m not strapped in, and we’ve just come over the peak.
It’s devastating to read about how someone’s beautiful cosy life with husband Cam and son Charlie can be torn in two, and a million pulverised pieces besides, when one diagnosis is delivered by a doctor who knows the news they are delivering is bad but who can’t possible be aware just how bad it is.
Two years or so after the worst day of her life, Kate Whittaker is somehow, and she’s not entirely sure how, still on her own two feet, keeping now five-year-old Charlie happy and alive, staying in close contact with best friend Grace who wants a kid of her own (and a guy too if life would be so kind), dealing with her overbearing, if well-meaning mother, trying to be successful, and she suspects failing, at being a university fundraiser extraordinaire, and trying to figure if her endlessly caring and supportive boss Hugh, and Cam’s bestie, Hugh, is more than just the guy who always seems to have her back.
It’s a LOT to juggle when you are the only parent now on duty and Kate barely has time to keep up with the endless demands placed upon her, let along have the time and space to grief properly.
That is until she and Hugh, on their way to Far North Queensland to dazzle some potential new investors, find themselves forced to land, by all-east coast of Australia weather system, at Ballina-Byron airport up in far northern NSW and have no choice but to buckle down for a few days and ride the wild weather out at a small beachside hamlet.
It’s the first time Kate has stopped, actually stopped, and while her grief is ever present and her loss ever palpable and gut wrenching in ways she can’t even begin to articulate so overwhelmingly omnipresent are they, she finally finds herself alone with her grief.
Terrifying? YES. Kind of a relief too? YES too but when all the tears begin falling and the loss finds defined form in ways that surprise her, Kate begins to realise that maybe it is time to try to move on with her life, even if that feels all but impossible and she knows, in her heart of hearts, that she will never forget or stop loving Cam with every fibre of her being.
The Last Love Note is a remarkable rom-com novel.
While it does offer the healing idea that another phase of your life is possible, and it cleaves close to the genre trope so closely that knowing who the person will be the engineer this is obvious from the get-go, it does so in such a profoundly real and truthful way that it is unlike anything else you have ever read in this particular style of book.
Having lost her own husband suddenly, Grey is well aware that you don’t simply giddily move on when you realise someone else is in the offing; in fact, she bravely admit in her acknowledgements that she has yet to meet her “Hugh”, the new man who might jumpstart her next happy-ever-after but she understands well the searing contours of grief, how it wound you so badly that you begin to doubt you will ever heal, that you can love again and that love and life won’t always feel constantly and precariously under threat.
‘It is what it is,’ he says. He’s right. It’s a mash-up of inconceivable devastation and unbelievable wonder. A clash of two almost overpowering tragedies, through which hope has been pushing up quietly, tenaciously, all this time. Fighting for light. Needing just the right amount of spine-tingling courage to tip the future in a new direction.
There is a brutally grounded and deeply affecting honesty to The Last Love Note which is alive with hope and possibility but through revisiting painful past events and present cutting loss, also heartbreaking in ways that cut right through to the core of your soul.
It’s impossible to read this exquisitely well-written book, which surges with brilliantly beguiling dialogue, three-dimensionally rich characters and a weighty emotionality that adds muscularity to the hopefulness that percolates through it, and not be profoundly, forever moved.
We all fear losing that person that makes the world WORK, and having had her fears cruelly realised, Grey invests Kate, who is believably, affectingly, sadly honest about where she is and who she thinks she might be, with a wretched believability that knows how hard it is to escape the vortex of grief that consumes when you lose someone you DEEPLY love.
Finding love and hope again feels like a bridge far too far, and you almost feel guilty for wanting it, but as The Last Love Note progresses in all its richness and truthfulness, bookended by notes, one of which captures Kate’s heart and the other which heals and frees her, you begin to realise it might just be something you can find.
And watching Kate find it, and realise the loss of Cam will never leave her but maybe, just maybe, life can come alive again, is a resonant joy, one soaked to the core with the idea that life can be mortally wounded to the point where there seems no hope of healing or redemption until there it is and you have to make a decision to bring it in, hold it close and see where the rest of life, life you never expected to happen, will take you.