To Never See Heaven

To Never See Heaven opens with the protagonist, Antony

Shrader, agonizing over his decision to write a commencement speech

traditionally given by his husband. This year is different. His lover is

dying. In order to bring himself to do this speech, Antony must look

back at the pages of his own life that have brought him to fulfill this

duty. After all, a commencement is not the end. It is the beginning.


Antony’s story begins as a gay teenager born into privilege.

However, Antony’s sensitive nature and unresolved traumas had

convinced him that he had lived a past life as a suffering poet. He

believed that the inevitable separation from his family and their elitist

world was his chance to redeem himself from beyond a world he knew.

Antony could not shake these feelings of his fated doom and loneliness.

To escape this void, he would flee to study in Paris, either to rise to the

true destiny of his life or to lay down his body where he felt the true

origins of his spirit had been conceived. There, Antony would fall in

love, but while his heart and mind flourished in Paris, his body and spirit

would succumb to addiction; the demons of his past life came to haunt

him. In the process of trying to outrun himself, his fall into the darkness

inevitably brings him to humility and true healing. There he found what

he had needed most, his own love and acceptance.