Karen Paul has written about caregiving, parenting, marriage, death, loss, and grief for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Lilith, Modern Loss, Open Secrets, and Motherwell, as well as literary magazines and anthologies. Her short story “Vertigo” won the Lilith Short Fiction Contest. Karen holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and facilitates grief-writing workshops locally and online. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with Bo, a black-and-white dog who rescued her family.

When her husband is diagnosed with glioblastoma, Karen Paul becomes a full-time caregiver overnight. Their marriage, the landscape of which had always shown fractures, is instantly and radically transformed. Years after the long vigil of illness and his death, Karen faces the uneasy recalibration that follows and a new identity she never asked for: widow.

Told in three parts, Cartography of Loss chronicles the very particular and personal—from hospital corridors and hospice visits to tattoos and the strange circumstance of falling in love again. Along the journey, readers bear witness through stages of early widowhood, life’s continuance in spite of unbearable grief, and the echoes of losses compounded over a lifetime.

Exploring how a widow must learn to map out her life in new ways after devastating loss, Paul’s is more than a grief memoir, it’s a clear-eyed, often funny exploration of how loss rearranges a life—and proof that even after the unimaginable, there is a way forward, one essay at a time.