I Didn't Write This Book After Grief. I Wrote It From the Middle of It.
There are some books you write because you have something to teach.
There are others you write because you have lived long enough to look back, gather the lessons, and tell someone else what you learned.
Hope and Healing After the Loss of a Spouse is neither of those books.
I wrote this one from the middle.
On April 26, 2025, my husband, Kent, unexpectedly passed away, and the life I knew changed in an instant. I wasn't prepared for the silence that followed. I wasn't prepared for all the decisions that suddenly belonged to me, the ordinary moments that would become painful, or the strange reality of learning how to live in a world where the person I loved was no longer physically beside me.
I certainly wasn't thinking about writing a book.
I was simply trying to live.
Writing While I Was Still Healing
Most of the books I have written came from a place where I could look back.
I had experienced something, learned from it, prayed through it, and eventually reached a place where I could turn around and help someone walking behind me.
This book was different.
There was no comfortable distance between the writer and the experience.
I was writing about grief while grieving.
I was writing about loneliness while learning how to live with the absence of Kent’s presence.
I was writing about faith while having to decide, sometimes moment by moment, whether I would continue trusting God with a life that looked nothing like the one I had planned.
I didn't have every answer.
I still don't.
But I had Scripture.
And I had God, who continued meeting me in the middle of questions I couldn't always answer.
I Went Looking for God in My Grief
Loss has a way of making you revisit things you thought you understood.
I knew God was faithful.
I had taught about His faithfulness.
I had encouraged other people to trust Him.
But grief required me to ask a different question:
Do I still believe this when my own heart is broken?
So I went back to the Word.
I found myself looking again at people in Scripture who experienced loss, uncertainty, waiting, disappointment, and lives that changed without their permission.
I began seeing familiar passages differently.
Scripture wasn't giving me permission to pretend I wasn't hurting. Instead, it was teaching me that grief and faith could occupy the same heart.
I could miss my husband and still trust God.
I could cry and still worship.
I could have questions and still believe.
I could deeply love the life I had and still allow God to lead me into the life that remained.
That became one of the foundations of this book.
Learning to Live Again Is Not the Same as Moving On
One of the things I began to understand is that healing after the loss of a spouse isn't about erasing what came before.
It isn't about forgetting.
And it certainly isn't about replacing the person you loved.
It is about learning how to carry love differently.
There is a life that existed before loss, and then there is the life we slowly begin discovering afterward.
For a while, I didn't know what that life would look like.
Some days, I still don't.
But I have learned that continuing to live does not dishonor the person we loved so deeply.
Laughing again isn't betrayal.
Dreaming again isn't forgetting.
Finding purpose again doesn't mean the loss mattered less.
And allowing God to write another chapter does not require me to tear the previous chapters out of the story.
Why I Chose to Share This Journey
Writing this book required a vulnerability I had not experienced with my previous books.
These weren't simply lessons I had studied.
Some of these pages came from tears.
Some came from questions.
Some came from moments when God showed me something in Scripture that I desperately needed before I could ever imagine sharing it with someone else.
There were times when writing felt almost too personal.
But somewhere along the way, I realized something:
There was another woman sitting in her house, wondering how she was supposed to keep going without her husband.
There was a man learning to live without his wife, trying to be strong while privately wondering who he was now.
There was someone waking up for the first time without their spouse.
Someone facing an anniversary.
Someone sitting alone at church.
Someone making decisions that used to belong to two people.
Someone asking God, “What does my life look like now?”
I wanted that person to have something beside them that said:
You are not alone.
Not because I have mastered grief.
Not because I have reached some imaginary finish line.
But because I am walking this road too.
Today, This Book Leaves My Hands
Today, August 11, 2026, Hope and Healing After the Loss of a Spouse: Finding Faith, Strength, and Purpose While Learning to Live Again officially releases.
There is something deeply emotional about writing those words.
Because I know where these pages came from.
They came from prayer.
They came from tears.
They came from conversations with God.
They came from moments when I was searching for answers myself.
And they came from the growing realization that perhaps what God was teaching me in my own journey wasn't meant to stop with me.
Today, this book leaves my hands and begins making its way into the hands of others.
My prayer is that somewhere, someone who has lost their spouse will open these pages and realize:
Your life still holds meaning.
God is still faithfully present.
And He is not finished writing your story.
And perhaps that is what I understand more deeply now.
Hope doesn't always begin when the storm is over.
Sometimes hope begins right in the middle of it.
Sometimes it looks like getting up again.
Sometimes it looks like believing there can still be joy ahead.
And sometimes it is simply holding on to what Scripture calls “an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast” (Hebrews 6:19, NKJV), trusting that the God who was faithful in the chapters we never wanted to end will still be faithful in the chapters we never expected to write.
I am still grieving.
I am still healing.
I am still learning.
I am still living.
And God is still writing.
Anchored in hope and sustained by grace,
Dr. Charis M. Rooks (Doc)
If you are learning to live again after the loss of your spouse or know someone who is, Hope and Healing After the Loss of a Spouse was written to walk alongside you.
