I just finished reading Epilogue and I would highly recommend it for a true heartwarming, yet heartbreaking love story that is full of truth, hope, and renewal. The memoir reminded me not to take my relationship with David for granted, to not rush through a random embrace in the kitchen when making dinner or a lengthy medical story or a goodnight kiss; those are the little moments that help to define our marriage and life together.
Please allow me to share my favorite two paragraphs with you, which happen to be the final paragraphs of the book, and the two I just cannot stop reading:
“I do not have my soul mate and most likely will never have another bug I will be fine. I can read. I can think. I can work. I can see friends. I can watch my grandchildren grow. I can walk in the park and I can listen to music and I can argue politics and I can pass, if fate allows it, from old to older in the usual manner. I will be sad often but not always. I will be lonely most always bit not unbearably so. I will look forward to small things, a dinner with friends, a movie, the first orange persimmons. I will miss sex. I will miss conversations after midnight with the covers pulled up tight across the chest to keep the warmth inside while cold air frosts the windowpanes. I will have no one to tell good news or bad. I will miss the unsaid things that passed between H. and me. But I will manage without them. I will make new friends in unexpected places. I will take trip somewhere I have always wanted to go. I will not let grief become my constant companion. I will refuse its offer to accompany me to the corner, to the night, to the next month.
If the owl and the pussycat went to sea in a pea-green boat and the owl flew off, the pussycat better pickup the oars and row toward shore–she has, after all, neither wings or gills. She must dance by herself by the light of the moon.”
Since reading Epilogue, the sound of David making a snack in the kitchen or walking into the bedroom to read next to me, makes me feel so happy and lucky that I actually have him here with me, to hug tightly, to lie next to and talk to.
Squeeze the one you love a little longer and tighter today and, if you are looking for a good book, read Epilogue.
Brown Goat 