Even After Everything

A gorgeous memoir that honors life’s deep griefs, great joys, and unsettled in-betweens throughout every sacred season, reminding us that we are never alone

This beautifully written memoir is for anyone who has walked a hard road and wondered how to get to the other side. Stephanie Duncan Smith promises that it’s not through grit and force that you will find a way forward, but through leaning in to the promises that hold true when all seems lost.

Duncan Smith’s personal disorientation began when she lost her first pregnancy on the winter solstice’s longest night, just as the world readied to celebrate its most historic birth on Christmas. Then a new yet uncertain pregnancy unfolded in parallel to the global pandemic, until one year nearly to the day of her loss, she gave birth to her daughter whose birthday marked the peak of pandemic death in their city. This clash prompted a desperate search for steadiness, in which the liturgical year became an anchoring force. 

In Even After Everything, Duncan Smith looks to the church’s calendar as a way of finding and reorienting ourselves within the sacred story of Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, and Ordinary Time. The Christian year illuminates a full circle of love, loss, and liminality, holding space for the full spectrum of the human experience. At its heart lives the promise of God-With-Us, inviting us into the spiritual practice of living well by accepting that there is a time for everything, and trusting that in whatever moment we find ourselves, we are never truly alone.