In Limbo

Two months after her wedding, Maya Letellier was asked to make the decision no spouse should ever have to make.

At thirty-five, she sat beside her husband's hospital bed as doctors explained that his rare, aggressive leukemia had left no hope of recovery. The decision to remove life support fell to her.

She said yes.

Searching for stories that reflected her own experience, Maya found very few. There were books about widowhood, but almost none about being young, childless, newly married, and expected to rebuild a life before she had even begun living the one she'd planned.

In Limbo is that missing story — a memoir of sudden loss, and the long, uneven road to healing in the four years that followed. From the intensive care unit to the ocean where she scatters her husband's ashes and later learns how to freedive, from guided imagery therapy to the bewildering reality of dating again. Written with the pacing of literary fiction, she explores the disorienting landscape of early grief with striking honesty and what it means to continue living when the future you imagined disappears overnight.

Told through the sharp eye of a lawyer trained to argue every side and the vulnerability of someone facing the ultimate question with no winning argument, Maya captures grief as it truly unfolds: nonlinear, contradictory, heartbreaking, darkly comedic, and filled with moments that refuse easy resolution.

For anyone navigating the death of a spouse, grieved without a script, or is searching for a story that simply says I felt this too, In Limbo offers something rare: proof that both loss and hope can share in the same space.

Book cover photograph of the author, Maya Letellier, freediving in a cenote in Mexico. Photographed by Marianna Tombini. Suspended between surface and depth — neither rising nor sinking — a fitting image for a book titled In Limbo about being caught between two worlds, two versions of a life.

Coming to Amazon in softcover and ebook, Fall 2026