Today’s special guest is writer Cheryl Krauter and we’re chatting about her memoir, Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go.
Bio:
Cheryl Krauter is an existential humanistic psychotherapist with more than forty years of experience in the field of depth psychology and human consciousness. Her background in theater arts, working with performing artists, visual artists, and creative people, has inspired her work. After her cancer diagnosis in 2007, she began to focus on people who have been diagnosed with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, as well as their partners, family members, and caregivers. Her two published books, Surviving the Storm: A Workbook for Telling Your Cancer Story (Oxford University Press 2017) and Psychosocial Care of Cancer Survivors: A Clinician’s Guide and Workbook for Providing Wholehearted Care (Oxford University Press 2018), grew out of this work. Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go will be released in July 2021 by She Writes Press.
Welcome, Cheryl. Please tell us about your current release.
Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go, is my raw, grief-stricken account of losing my husband and soulmate, John, suddenly and unexpectedly.
The story is told in scenes that describe my experience of navigating my day-to-day world while at the same time living in a twin world of absence and memory making me feel like the mythical character, Mis, the wild woman of Irish mythology. In the throes of grief, Mis railed and raged but never sank. Eventually, she rejoined the living. For me, John’s death was such a blow that I couldn’t process it immediately and though I functioned well, like Mis, it took time before I emerged from that twilight of loss. As the story unfolds, I began to recognize the ways in which John’s passing changed my life, and how I am still learning to continue on while still carrying a deep sadness at our parting.
Told in two parts, the memoir begins with the ritual of scattering John’s ashes and then moves to the mythological and spiritual, to address the rocky and isolating emotional terrain of grief. As John was an avid fly fisherman, and I became a slightly competent one, Part I includes adventures and misadventures on streams and rivers. Connecting the two parts is a description of Los Días de los Muertos, the three days each year when I build an altar to remember and honor deceased loved ones.
Gradually, through the experiences described in the memoir, I began to find my path to saying goodbye, letting the roots of love and remembrance give me strength as I move on with my new life. Odyssey of Ashes is poetic and spiritual while also being sprinkled with moments of humor.
My experience is not singular, we all face deep ruptures and profound losses, and I share my journey from overwhelming grief to acceptance and peace as an offering of hope, as well as a testament to resilience and the possibility of healing that we carry within us.
What inspired you to write this book?
Five months after John died, he won a prize of a guided fly-fishing trip for two in Montana in a raffle offered by Casting for Recovery, an organization that helps women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. He had entered this raffle every year for nearly a decade with the hope of putting a check mark on his bucket list. The prize was offered to me to go in his place. This event, and the ensuing trip to Montana, which seemed both so magical and tragic, was the catalyst for this book. “Is it a kind of madness to live out the dream of another? This question will plague me as the future I anticipated disintegrates into ash and I find myself contemplating bringing John to Montana in a small, plastic bag to one of the great rivers of his desires, fulfilling a wish on a bucket list that does not belong to me.” Excerpt from Odyssey of Ashes.
Excerpt for Odyssey of Ashes:
“We whirl around in a dizzying dance from darkness to light and then light to darkness and back again; our lives explode, but we are carried along regardless of our limited ideas and plans. The shadows of the departed continue to haunt our dreams. Grief has no finish line, no real conclusions. We get dealt a hand we didn’t want and have to play it anyway—you gotta play it as it lies. And in the end, you do just that, even when you don’t feel like it (maybe especially when you don’t feel like it), because it’s the right thing to do.
And so, my story remains unfinished.
And it is not an exceptional story. I’m not special. I am not famous. I am just a woman living the same grieving story that has been lived by humans across time, because loss is the inevitable price we pay for being alive. And the more deeply we connect with others, the heavier the loss is to carry. You change, your grief changes, your life changes, and still you continue. The exhaustion of sadness becomes a part of your flesh and, over time, turns into scar tissue that will remain a part of you forever.
From the early-hour horror of John’s heart rupturing— the moment when the ground I had known was torn away by a terrible wind and I was blown into a timeless, watery world—to the banks of the Madison River, where I nearly sank into the drenched earth along with John’s ashes, to the mice-killing fields in my garage to the clink of glasses of bubbly rosé with strangers with whom, for a moment, I found community, I’ve had to find my way. And somehow, through the storms, the raging winds, and the torrential rain that swept through me like an uncontrollable tempest, the roots deep within my being held. These roots that are wound around my heart and set in the deep ground of my being did not break, even as I was carried by a monstrous, crying wind into unrecognizable realms that left me breathless and weary to my bones. Our roots, when deep, hold us through the ravages of grief, through the darkness of winter, and through the losses that will eventually come and take us away from all that we have known and loved.”
What exciting story are you working on next?
My mind is whirling around a story based on a homeless artist who appears from time to time on the street where I work. I develop projects reflectively within myself, letting ideas, feelings, images appear as they will. I make notes of these reflections in a notebook used only for this particular story. The notebook may contain scraps of paper with ideas written on receipts and post-its along with longer passages containing more in-depth writing on the project. I would like to write this story as a novel, possibly as my “swan song”. As I tend to write in a mythopoetic style, I imagine this story having that feel to it. Being a huge fan of authors who take a significant amount of time to craft a book, I welcome the opportunity to work on this without the pressure of a deadline.
It has also been suggested to me that I might write a screenplay based on Odyssey of Ashes.
And finally, I’m contemplating putting together a book of poetry using poems I’ve already written as well as composing new ones.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
When I was a freshman in high school I wrote a couple of poems and submitted them to the school literary magazine under the pseudonym Tansy Potter because I was too shy to identify myself as the poet. To my surprise and delight, both poems were accepted and published in the magazine. One day in my freshman English class the teacher, Miss Janns, read both poems and wondered out loud who the poet might be. In a rare moment of courage, I raised my hand to claim my work. Miss Sheila Janns and Mrs. Carol Hanke were the staff advisors for the literary magazine and both of them mentored me from that time on. I owe them both a deep bow of gratitude for encouraging a shy, anxious, depressed, lonely girl to come out of her shell and write. I ended up co-editor of the literary magazine and continued to write from that time on.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I am a psychotherapist with a private practice in depth existential humanistic psychotherapy. This is my life’s work and I’ve been in private practice for over forty years with no signs of retirement on the horizon. During the pandemic, I have been working beyond full time as a therapist alongside the finishing of this memoir and now focusing on all of the responsibilities of putting it out into the world. In essence, I have two callings, a psychotherapist and an author.
I am a cancer survivor and have written two books previous to this memoir. One is for cancer survivors and the other is for clinicians who work in oncology. I work with people in all stages of a cancer diagnosis from diagnosis to end of life. I am involved in teaching/giving workshops/presentations of this material to people who have been diagnosed with cancer, caregivers, and clinicians who work in oncology.
I have to carve out time to write which can often mean early mornings or late nights. I have structured my time on weekends to write for extended periods of time – often forgoing social engagements ( waaah!). Before the pandemic I would schedule writing retreats away from home. I also enjoyed sitting at various cafes, the different settings providing a change of venue that I often find helps ignite and open up my creative flow. As the world slowly begins to open up, I look forward to taking my writing practice back out. At this point, I don’t feel right if I go too long without spending a good chunk of time writing and hope that I might be able to write on a more full-time basis in the future.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I change tenses constantly, not only in a paragraph but often even in the same sentence. My poor editors have nearly been driven to drink!
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An actress. I pursued this career as a young woman ending up in Los Angeles/Hollywood but left the business after a series of #MeToo experiences. I was able to scratch out a small living doing voice over work for training films for nurses How could I have imagined at that time that decades later that twenty-something actor would eventually become a psychotherapist teaching oncology nurses in person? I don’t regret my time in LA seeking acting work but am profoundly glad that I left it behind to create a meaningful career as a psychotherapist.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
My deepest intention with everything I have written is to give the reader something that will touch their lives and offer a sense of possibility, renewal, hope, and inspiration. The most meaningful reviews and comments that I receive always involve hearing that what I have put out into the world has helped someone. This is what matters most to me.
Beautiful interview. Thank you!