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The human heart is an unreliable architect, at once fragile and astonishingly resilient, building and rebuilding amid the inevitable wreckage of loss. Few understand this more intimately than Tony Stewart, whose memoir, Carrying the Tiger, traces the winding and unlit path through his wife Lynn’s battle with cancer and his own slow reentry into the world of the living.
The conversation drifted first to origins. Stewart described how the book began not as a book at all, but as a series of raw dispatches posted to CaringBridge—a digital confessional for families besieged by illness. “Lynn asked me to write the posts,” he recalled. Private by nature, Lynn preferred that her health updates be shared impersonally, at arm’s length. What started as a practical matter, a way of sparing her the repeated performance of pain, slowly evolved into a lifeline: for friends, for family, and, eventually, for Stewart himself.
After Lynn’s death, a quiet chorus began to form: friends urging him to continue, to shape his grief into something larger. “You’re helping me deal with my grief,” they told him. And so, reluctantly, he did.
The first iteration was modest—a spiral-bound volume, stitched together from the online posts, handed out to a few close friends. But Stewart sensed something unfinished in the gesture. There were layers, omissions, secrets gently hidden between the lines of those early updates, all demanding a fuller telling. “I’m actually more interested in what I left out than what I put in,” he said, with the cool detachment of someone who has lived long enough to understand that storytelling is less about disclosure than about discretion.
Over the course of a year and a half, the book underwent four or five revisions. What emerged was not simply a chronicle of dying, but a double portrait: of Lynn in her final days, and of Stewart himself, frozen in the strange posture of a man loving, tending, and, eventually, remembering.
Of course, revisiting the landscape of grief was no simple undertaking. “I tried several times, much more soon after she died, and I couldn’t do it,” Stewart admitted. Only with time—years, not months—could he find the emotional clearance to write without drowning. Even so, the first drafts, he said, were “soggy with tears.”
Gradually, the tide receded. What remained was the work of a storyteller. “It happens that I lived this story,” Stewart said. “But now how can I make it a great story?”
Talk of grief led us to metaphors. I offered my favorite: the black ball inside a canning jar, which doesn’t shrink with time but becomes proportionally smaller as the jar grows larger. Stewart offered one of his own: laying down planks of flooring, day by day, over the raw and uneven ground of memory.
He also spoke, with something approaching indignation, about the social expectation that love can be replaced like a broken appliance. “The challenge was learning how to have both,” he said. “How to keep my love for Lynn, which I refuse to let go of, while simultaneously finding my way into a new relationship.”
I asked him what Lynn, wherever she was, might think of the life he has built. Stewart smiled. “I think she’s simultaneously feeling very happy for me, very proud of me, and embarrassed that I’m making a big deal about her.” Lynn, he noted, had always been allergic to grand gestures. One of the last things she told him, with characteristic dryness, was that she hoped he would find a new girlfriend—permission, framed in the most unassuming terms.
There were practical lessons too, ones he seemed almost impatient to pass along. Chief among them: get help. “The most important thing of all is to get support,” Stewart said, recalling his own early resistance and the inevitable collapse that followed. Complicated emotions—resentment, guilt, the flickers of selfishness that feel so obscene in the face of mortality—are part of the package, he assured me. A good therapist, he said, was the one who finally told him: you’re normal.
Stewart’s memoir promises “the discovery of joy amidst sorrow”—a claim that, in lesser hands, might ring hollow. I asked him for an example. He spoke of reconnecting with a childhood friend, both of them newly widowed, their grief forming a strange but sturdy bridge. “I discovered that grief and joy can coexist,” he said, without flourish.
In the end, Stewart hopes readers will take away one essential truth: that beauty, grace, and joy are not suspended in times of tragedy; they run parallel, hidden just beneath the rubble. “When you have faced mortality,” he said, “you start seeing beauty in the world—and in the simple fact of being alive—that you didn’t appreciate before.”
As we spoke, Stewart recalled the first spring after Lynn’s diagnosis, spent together in a ghostly New York City still shuttered by the pandemic. The trees bloomed, extravagantly, heedlessly. “We saw this every day in a way that I never had before,” he said. “We talked to each other about how magical it was.”
Today, Stewart lives in a home adorned with Lynn’s paintings and photographs—a kind of quiet museum, curated not out of sorrow but out of gratitude. With his current partner, Cordelia, he has woven rituals of remembrance into the fabric of daily life.
Carrying the Tiger is not, ultimately, a story about death. It is about the stubbornness of love, the endurance of beauty, and the possibility—against all odds—of finding the way back to oneself.
Learn more about Tony Stewart.
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