“This collection of short stories, a finalist for the Danuta Gleed award, is a meditation on grief, loss and memory. Though every story features the bereaved, Clare, and the deceased, her husband Rich, I won’t call it a “collection of short stories that feels like a novel” as is so often used to recommend a collection, because it is something better - it’s a collection of short stories that feels complete, and fulfils an arc, without needing to be a novel. The spaces between the stories or the way they jump in time never feel like cheating or skipping - they feel like a natural extension of the grieving brain, described by Hunter as “The whole winter falls through a cold hole in my memory and vanishes forever” and “I put the mail in the breadbox and the bread in the bookcase.”

Grief is a common experience, but not all grief is alike (Hunter complains of the “thing among therapists, to divide feelings into categories and to name the categories.”) The losses that have all rocked me the most were quick, sudden deaths. Hunter describes the agony of Rich’s slow wasting away from cancer, as Clare cares for him while also continuing to work as a university professor. This is an experience I don’t yet know first-hand, but Hunter brings it to life, with all the decisions the caregiver is pressured to make while already overwhelmed - the heartbreak of signing up for an experimental drug only to realize all it could ever promise was a few more months and not a cure, of choosing to wait to go to the hospital until Rich’s regular oncologist is going to be there and then realizing that this decision means he will never leave the hospital again and won’t be able to die where he had wanted, of trying to find a funeral home amid upselling and big talking by the staff. Then there are the parts that are more universal. The incongruity of facing death at Christmas as the radio plays “All I Want for Christmas is You.” The well-meaning but horrific comments by friends, colleagues and health care providers. The inability to do something as simple as grocery shopping, and yet the insatiable desire to rip out wallpaper and carpets.

The opening story, Calling You, was first published in Prairie Fire and won a National Magazine Award. Rich’s cell phone disappears from the hospital and the Find My Phone app shows it is in northwest Winnipeg in the Inkster area, one I know well due to my in-laws (a joy for Winnipeggers will be recognizing all the parts of our city mentioned in the stories - and the Jets in the playoffs!) Clare goes on a search for the missing phone that brings her face to face with the randomness and fragility of life and edges her closer to acceptance of what is to come.

This story sets the tone for all the others - there are big thoughts on suffering and mortality, but also wicked humour. The machinations of the corrupt, inept funeral home staff and the repeated breaking down of Clare’s furnace days after Rich’s death are so absurd, they can only be reflections of reality that make us laugh even as we are appalled. We see Clare and Rich at the beginning of their relationship, so young and unencumbered that they take risks with their lives, going boating in a storm. They have a simple, uncomplicated love - they are very different people but, unlike in Clare’s first marriage, they accept each other for who they are and they know a deep, true love that is beautiful to read about - as Hunter writes, “a warm, nostalgic glow spread out around the three of us, the kind you get when you’re still young enough to enjoy nostalgia.”

For a while, Clare is stuck in the hell of memories of Rich’s last days, weeks and months - his illness, his weight loss, the things that drifted away from him. Interestingly, we never see the actual moment oh Rich’s death, but we don’t need to. As a reader, I understand that this moment is private, and that it is still too much to face. Healing for Clare comes in the last story, Seeing You Home, when she can go back further, to happier times. We understand that Rich saw her home in life and his love and her memories of it will see her home in death. The last sentences of the last story are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever read.

Margaret Atwood also traces this journey of the loss of a spouse through short stories in Old Babes in the Wood, but I think Seeing You Home does it better - the writing is more immersive, the emotions seem more genuine and pure. Clare is very relatable with the side of her that wants to take charge and be organized, the side of her that is dramatic, bold, weepy and impulsive, and the side of her that shrinks to please people.

I love these stories, but I needed to go slowly because I wept so much and my emotions became overwhelming. That’s the lovely thing about short stories - you can progress at your own pace, reading them little by little, one by one, until they see you home.”

— Zilla Jones, author of The World So Wide

Read the full review at GoodReads

“Hunter’s poignant, linked stories mull love, loss and meaning

Winnipeg poet and novelist Catherine Hunter’s new collection of 10 linked stories, Seeing You Home, is about longtime married couple Clare and Richard as it weaves through their time together, his death from cancer and her discovery of moving on in life.

Time is fluid in these stories — the present often suddenly abuts the past — but the subtle underlying theme is that though death always stalks the living, we are touched with the simple grace of life inviting us, as it does Clare, to move forward no matter how difficult.

The ritual of discovering this insight fuels the great story Romeo, Illinois, when Clare re-discovers “I.” The mixing of first and third person is complex, but Hunter manages it with clear, measured prose. Its use shows how we are seen, and who we really are inside.

Here remembrance joins the daily grind as Clare/I, almost immediately after Richard’s death in the dead of winter, deals with home heating troubles, funeral home business intrigue gumming up Richard’s cremation, the pressures of academic life and well-meaning friends and relatives.

At its centre is the furnace saga with a part needed for the finicky outlet that’s only available in Romeo, Ill., which may as well be Mars for Clare. Her outburst of frustration over this, and everything else, connects her once again to the exigency of life against death.

Even stronger is Re-Entry, told entirely in the first person in striking, poetic short paragraphs detailing Clare’s return to the house as she remembers, in scrupulous detail, Richard’s devastating diagnosis on an Easter weekend and her feeling that their life has already ended. “I am remembering the Columbia spaceship burned up on re-entry. I’m thinking I can no more return to the same old Earth than you can,” she muses.

In Renovations, Clare begins to re-model the family house. Her old carpet becomes a squirrel’s new home, as the reader follows both in finding the best life for each of them. We are even given the squirrel’s viewpoint.

What could be merely coy becomes wryly funny and heartwarming in the best way when Clare decides not to rid herself of Richard’s beloved objects, and instead she “squirrels” them away. In providing discarded carpet for the squirrel’s best home, she realizes she also needs her home filled with Richard’s spirit.

The title story, Seeing You Home, sees fragments of other stories come together much like a coda of a symphony. Clare (or “I”) has gone through the journey which saw the mechanics of dying give way to clarity and strength. As she puts it, “The whole winter falls through a cold hole in my memory and vanishes forever.”

Near misses are few but striking in a collection this emotionally rich. Sidhe, an overlong story about a trip to Ireland, Clare’s ancestral home, turns sentimental though not maudlin, and has an unconvincing lumpy mystical overtone.

In 700 Stages of Grief, an edgy tone towards the entire medical system (which works so well in the best stories) turns to open hostility, while inexplicably Clare’s always-believable exasperation turns to anger. The reader is left puzzled — there just isn’t enough narrative to go on to convince, which leaves this story out of tune with the rest.

No story is dull, but sometimes Hunter’s power of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary falters, though the banal never appears.

Still, even a near-miss by Catherine Hunter is worth considering, while the soaring best of these stories are must-reads.”

— Rory Runnells Winnipeg Free Press

Read the full review at Winnipeg Free Press.