Kate Bowler, Ph.D. is a 3x New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and professor at Duke University. Kate was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 35. While she was in treatment and not expected to survive, she wrote two New York Times bestselling memoirs, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear). After years of being told she was incurable, she was declared cancer-free. But she was forever changed by what she discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone. Kate is determined to create a gentler world for everyone who wants to admit that they are not “living their best life.” She hosts the Everything Happens podcast where, in warm, insightful, often funny conversations, she talks with people about what they’ve learned in difficult times. Author of seven books, she lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family and continues to teach do-gooders at Duke Divinity School.
A blessing for when you've lost someone far too soon by Kate C. Bowler
God, this. This is impossible.
This grief is too much to bear.
If there was a tight order
to the world that you made,
it’s come unspooled
and no one will wind it up again.
God, I feel it coming,
that ache for the stories that will never be told.
And an anger rising
when i remember
what never should have been.
Worst of all – God, could anything be worse? –
it is so beautiful
the way this grief is a language of love.
I am lovesick with this much sorrow.
Teach me to speak this new mother tongue.
Show me how to memorize
what I can never forget
what they gave and what is gone,
and what we were owed
by a world robbed of their presence.
Hold me by the edges
for I am coming apart.
And nothing but love
will find me.