A moving, deeply honest account of great love and loss – this small book is a tender companion for those who are grieving.
After “nine days in which we thought you would recover and then eight days in palliative care,” Carol Matthew’s husband of more than forty years passed away suddenly. Through the shock and grief that follows, Carol writes and writes, with love and anger and honesty and heartbreak, as she comes to an understanding of bereavement as not the end, but as a stage of married love.
The owl of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, spreads its wings only at twilight. In Minerva’s Owl, Carol Matthews finds solace in reflecting back on a marriage, a life, a person – in lyrical prose, in devastating honesty, and with hard-won insight.
Structured in six sections – grieving, longing, belonging, mourning, cleaving, and surviving – Minerva’s Owl offers not a step-by-step guide to grief, but an understanding companion to walk with the reader through dark days. Part grief memoir, part love story, this book is a gift for anyone who has lost someone they loved. This new second edition of the book provides a new epilogue that reflects on loss more than a decade later, and a new introduction from Maria Coffey, author of Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest.
Praise for Minerva’s Owl
“Minerva’s Owl is more than a tender handbook for the grieving; a brimming saga of a courtship and marriage, it reminds us to attend well to the art of living.” ALISON WATT, author of Dazzle Patterns
“Carol Matthews has given anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one a generous gift, insight into the roller coaster that is grieving and the lived experience that demonstrates that life is still worth living.” CAROLINE BURNLEY, Ph.D., Professor, Dept. of Psychology, Vancouver Island University
“This is the best book on grief, mourning, and loss that I have ever read – and believe me I have read a few.” WENDY PRATT, former Executive Director of Hospice Nanaimo
“Although Matthews explores the profundity of grieving, she balances this raw pain with new ways of seeing. As her subtitle suggests, she views life after Mike’s death not as widowhood, but as ‘a distinct phase of our continuing marriage. One in which we are apart and yet together.’” MALAHAT REVIEW
“The process of being authentic towards death could not be narrated better. From recollection and actuality, she faces a potential future where her (Minerva’s) owl could once more open its wings and continue living, yet with a deeper understanding of life and accepting oneself as a mortal being.” CANADIAN LITERATURE
“Carol Matthews’ Minerva’s Owl is an eloquent and emotionally engaging account of her early years as a widow – seeking (and finding) ‘tiny points of light within a huge surround of darkness and shadow.’ Her calm voice offers the reader her most intimate, wise, and thoughtful company.” JACK HODGINS, author of Spit Delaney’s Island and Broken Ground
“Carol Matthews has done the remarkable. Of the numerous books that have been written about loss, Matthews has given us an original, startling and deeply thought-provoking work. There is an intimacy to her writing that invites the reader in almost as an eavesdropper. What we hear are our own thoughts and questions. What we are left with is a sense of peace – the kind that comes with the knowledge that, even in the darkest places, we are not alone.” EVE JOSEPH, author of Quarrels
“Full of hope and tenderness.” BC REVIEW
