I’m looking out across the San Francisco skyline, a vast mosaic of concrete and steel that coalesce into infinity. Beyond it, the bay glows amber beneath the setting sun, tranquil and unperturbed by the roar of the city.
I watch it all unfold from the couch in my hotel room. The city gently fades from gray to black, the bay from amber to cobalt, and as another day casually becomes another night, something about it takes my breath. My computer sits on my lap, a cursor blinking on a blank page, but the words don’t come. This is a feeling. An emotion. Visceral and indescribable. And for a little while, I close my eyes and let it carry me away.
It’s been nearly 2 years since Even If You Don’t first came into the world, and even still, I’m humbly overwhelmed by how the story has resonated in the hearts of so many. I accept precisely no credit; that belongs wholly to God and to you, my readers. Not a day passes that I don’t pray for the book — not for its commercial success, but for its success in helping mend broken spirits and comfort broken hearts. Using my pain to help others with their pain is perhaps the highest calling with which I have ever been entrusted, and to heed that calling will forever be an honor and a privilege.
But, strangely, the emotion I feel looking out at the northern California sky has little to do with Even If You Don’t. I’m not thinking of the successes. Not all the incredibly kind reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Not all the inspiring messages I receive every week on social media. Not even all the amazing people I’ve met at book signings and speaking events. I’m not thinking about any of these things because I’m not thinking about what Even If You Don’t did; I’m thinking about what it didn’t do.
Most of you probably know that Even If You Don’t was a love story. It told the harrowing tale of a young couple (myself and my wife, Kailen) whose youthful affections were forged into something far more profound and far more enduring by a stage IV breast cancer diagnosis at age 22. A fairytale and a tragedy melded into one mesmeric draught. And most of you probably know how the story ended.
Oddly enough, that’s what I’m thinking about. The end. And how those two words are fraudulent. A deception. A lie.
When you turned the final page of Even If You Don’t, it might have said “The End,” but it wasn’t. In fact, in a somewhat preternatural sense, it was the beginning of multitudes, some scintillatingly beautiful and some unspeakably ugly. One battle had ended but another had just begun; the bulk of the war was yet to be waged.
The end? No. Not even close.
And that is what takes my breath: The fact that so many people, many of whom may well be walking the city streets below me, think their story is over. They believe that tragedy ended their fairytale. They believe they no longer belong. That their lives are purposeless, meaningless. That they are no longer loved or wanted. They believe they’re a mutation, an aberrance, that they are strangers in a strange place. They believe they are anachronisms, soulless vestiges of a life already lived. Their grief has swallowed them whole, plunged them into an abyssal pool of guilt and shame. And as they thrash against the weight of loss using all the strength they have left, struggling to find breath, our misinformed culture calmly holds them under the waves until their futile gesticulations cease and they surrender to their fate.
That is why I wrote The Lazarus Within — because the end isn’t the end. You are not bad just because something happened to you, and your story isn’t nearly over. Our cultural grief narrative is grotesquely broken; in The Lazarus Within, we begin to rewrite it.
Many people have asked me if The Lazarus Within is a sequel to Even If You Don’t. The answer is a complicated one. But please allow me to explain it as simply as I know how:
The Lazarus Within opens with a simile: “My wife’s death was like the detonation of a grenade atop a snow-covered peak.”
Even If You Don’t told the story of the grenade.
The Lazarus Within tells the story of the avalanche.
We’ll pick up there next week.
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