Dedication
This book is dedicated to
Amy Krouse Rosenthal
(and the rest of the Rosies: Justin, Miles, Paris & Cougar)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: The Nest
1. A Love Story
2. No Longer Just One
3. Fun, Whimsical, and Creative Parenting
4. On Our Own
Part II: Loss
5. Something Is Not Right
6. Together We Are One
7. Is It All a Bunch of Crap?
8. One Last Bash
9. I’m That Guy
10. The End
Part III: Filling a Blank Space
11. Empty, Not Nest
12. Refueling Mind and Body
13. Navigating a Maze of Emotions
14. The Heal Jason Tour
15. Transitions
16. Connecting
17. Burning
18. Deepening the Loss
19. Have You Remarried Yet?
Epilogue: A Permanent Place to Gather
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything.
I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
I am writing this book because my wife died of ovarian cancer, but before you put it down and run in the other direction, please know, this won’t be a maudlin tale of death.
It can’t be.
The inspiration for writing this is a creative force, a woman who devoted her life to family, community, and connection, and had the kind of spirit we need a lot more of. She would have hated merely a dark tale of the end of life, because we had such a rich life together for over twenty-six years. Amy was an original. The last thing she would want is for the story of our lives together to wallow in humorless self-pity, because honestly, our time together had everything but that.
What this book is, instead, is an exploration of what it means to love, to lose, and to emerge from that loss somehow ready to be resilient in surprising and unexpected ways. It is a story of love and loss but also of appreciating the joy, beauty, and vitality of life. A story of how you come to the end of one part of your life and find a way to turn the page to the next. A story of my life with an exceptional woman, my wife, Amy Krouse Rosenthal. And a story of life without her as well.
Amy was an author, speaker, and filmmaker. As an author of two groundbreaking memoirs and as a children’s book author, she has touched thousands of minds, both young and old, but the piece of writing she is best known for is an essay that appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times. It’s called “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” and it was published on March 3, 2017.
Ten days later, Amy died.
She was too ill to appreciate the response, but it was spectacular. Her essay immediately went viral and was ultimately read by more than five million people. The genuineness of her voice leapt off the page to all who encountered it. The article was many things, but most of all it was a message to me. In retrospect, I now think that Amy, who after all knew me better than any human on this planet after twenty-six years of marriage and building a family and life together, perhaps thought that I needed her express permission to find love after she died. It’s a difficult thing for a dying spouse to say to her partner, let alone share with the entire world. And yet, like so much that Amy did, she pulled it off in a seemingly effortless manner.
The ten days between the date the essay was published and the day Amy died seemed like a microcosm of everything life has to offer—what should have been her highest high was tragically overshadowed by her imminent death. That impossible set of circumstances sent me on a journey I never imagined, didn’t want, and couldn’t have predicted; in one way it had an ending that came too soon. In another, it is an adventure that I will be on for the rest of my life. An odyssey that was made possible because of Amy.
In the years since Amy’s death, I have spoken publicly about her quite a bit. I have talked about us together, and even about our family. I have tried to address people’s astonishment at how we loved and understood each other so deeply. I have opened up about my personal experience with the issues of being with someone you love at the end of their life and of loss in general. I have also used the metaphor of the “empty space” that Amy gave me in her article to talk about resilience in the face of devastating loss. I have discussed the struggles of being single, single parenting, and doing something meaningful in my professional life while trying to fulfill her final wishes for me. However, I have not talked much about myself personally until now.
What follows in these pages is my attempt to share whatever small pieces of wisdom I’ve gained from an otherwise devastating process. Amy was a lot of things, but perhaps above all else, she was an optimist, her hunger for life insatiable. Her way of looking at the world was inspiring, even during difficult moments, and she would have delighted in the idea that some part of our story together could help someone else through their own personal darkness.
Not all love stories end the way you want them to, but often, that’s what makes them worth telling.
Part I
The Nest
1
A Love Story
So, darling, be home soon
I couldn’t bear to wait an extra minute if you dawdled
My darling, be home soon
It’s not just these few hours, but I’ve been waiting since I toddled
For the great relief of having you to talk to.
—John Sebastian
I’m a Chicago guy, born and raised. And in order to understand where Amy and I began, it helps to understand where I began.
Family has always been the center of who I am. My parents divorced when I was two years old. For the next eight years, until my mom, Jo, remarried, it was just Mom; my older sister, Michel; and me. The way my mom raised me on her own established the core of the man I’ve become. She struggled and did her best, and she went back to grad school and got her master’s degree in social work by the time I was five. (She’s still practicing.) She was super liberal, always encouraging me to be independent and do my own thing, as long as “my own thing” wasn’t stupid enough to throw my life out of order. I pushed the limits a little every once in a while, but I always respected her too much to make her wonder where I was or what I was doing.
My dad, Arnie, was a complicated man. He was definitely around on occasional weekdays and weekend sleepovers, and this was one cool, fun dude in my formative years. He was handsome, with a full head of hair, so no surprise that he always had a girlfriend. He was into sports and music, an idiot savant when it came to jazz. He was a beautiful artist who could draw anything, and an art historian who could spend hours in a museum.
Dad was obsessively devoted to his mother, my grandma Sara, and he routinely took my sister and me to visit her in Skokie, Illinois, a hub of the Jewish community that settled there after World War II. Her community, just outside of the Chicago city limits, was also the focus of a court battle brought by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of America to have the right to march in this neighborhood where many Holocaust survivors lived. Grandma Sara was a widow. She lived in a small apartment filled with furniture that was covered entirely in plastic—God forbid an unsanitary tush should make actual contact with the upholstery. No matter what restaurant we went to, particularly if it had bread service, Grandma Sara would
inevitably walk out with a purse full of freebies. I’m pretty sure I even saw salt and pepper shakers in there a time or two. Sundays at her place were mostly spent watching the Chicago Bears on TV while my sister entertained herself doing anything else.
For most of my childhood Dad was in the advertising business, which I thought was a very sexy job. He was a highly intelligent man, but unfortunately, he wasn’t the best at business. When I was in high school, he opened a commercial film studio in Lincoln Park. It seemed to be the culmination of Arnie’s dream. It was also the perfect storm of his self-image as an “artist” and his earnest attempt at being a successful businessman, which is to say it didn’t last as long as he’d hoped. But I have fond memories of working for him one summer in high school. I was, among other things, a production assistant—or, more accurately, an assistant to an assistant, driving a massively large van, picking up directors from the airport, and doing whatever grunt work no one else wanted to do. The hours were long, with plenty of all-nighters, but I was excited to have a closer look at what my dad was up to, and I learned a lot about the value of hard work and making money.
I was ten years old when Mom married my stepdad, Todd. They’re still married today. Todd taught me how to balance a checkbook and how to put together model cars and airplanes, and he encouraged me to study science and read more. Todd brought my mom love and stability. He brought an intellectual curiosity, a sharp sense of humor, and a paternal voice to me and Michel.
Looking back at Amy’s and my marriage, it would be tempting to surmise that I had a model for what it meant to be in a healthy relationship, and even what it takes to make a marriage work. Insert sound of game-show buzzer here: wrong. I can’t quite pinpoint how I was ready to enter my relationship with Amy when I did. I was a mere kid at twenty-six. Reflecting back on the question now, it occurs to me that it is probably a combination of many factors—watching 1970s sitcoms, seeing some of my friends’ parents, being solid in my own skin, my youthful ignorance, and falling in love with Amy. Oh, and a lot of luck. When I met Amy’s family, I subconsciously thought, “Wow, if Amy came from this much love and warmth, maybe we could create this too.”
Before I met Amy, I was what I’ve come to call a serial monogamist, starting with my first girlfriend in eighth grade, then in high school, followed by a long relationship in college. That is as serious as you can get when marriage isn’t even on your radar. My mom had modeled for me what it was to be kind to people. My sister did as well. Perhaps part of me did not want the contentiousness of what I saw my mom and dad go through as a divorced couple. Maybe, if I am being honest with myself, I did not want to be like my dad when it came to relationships and women. Part of it was that I was a calm, openhearted guy who saw that women were far superior to us dudes, and a hell of a lot of fun to be around.
All that is to say that even though I was not ready when I first met Amy (I just never thought this would happen in my twenties), the process of falling in love and getting close to someone was not foreign to me. We were lucky. We fell in love, and I was all in.
I was in my third year of law school in Chicago when I got a call from “Uncle John.” I’d known him since I was a kid—he’d dated my mom in the 1970s, when she was single—and unbeknownst to me until that day, he was apparently a modern-day male yenta.
It seemed his childhood friend Paul Krouse had a daughter named Amy, an advertising copywriter who’d just moved back to Chicago from San Francisco. I was twenty-four years old and single. Amy was twenty-four years old and single. John had known her since she was a kid too, and he had a premonition that she and I would hit it off.
I was slammed, in the throes of studying for the Illinois bar exam, but as a favor to John, I took down Amy’s phone number, called her, and asked her out.
Our first date, the first and only blind date of my life, was on July 2, 1989.
I picked Amy up in my VW Golf (manual transmission, stick shift). My first impressions were that she was super cute, tiny, full of energy, and immediately easy to talk to. She had long brown hair, not thick, that went beyond her shoulders. Dinner was at Jimmy and Johnnie’s, an Italian restaurant that no longer exists. I remember almost everything about that dinner, from the food to the atmosphere to the company to the fact that Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace was there, a few tables away. Then it was on to B.L.U.E.S., an intimate live blues music venue on Halsted Street.
It was a pretty special evening. Amy wrote, much later, that she knew she wanted to marry me by the time we finished eating. I knew I wanted to marry her a year later.
In many ways that summer was not an ideal time for me to start a relationship. I was preoccupied with my studies and lived almost every waking moment in the school’s law library. Standardized tests in general are not my jam. Or, to put it another way, I’m not good at them at all. I knew that I had to devote most of my time to getting ready for this test.
But from that first date, I knew that Amy was too good not to prioritize. So in spite of my workload, Amy and I stayed in touch and saw one another quite a few times. I’d never met anyone like her. It turned out she wasn’t just super cute, tiny, full of energy, and easy to talk to. She was also smart, revealed a curiosity about pretty much everything, and possessed a contagious passion for life.
How I still have my original note of Amy’s phone number, I have no idea, but here it is, misspelled last name and all.
I remember our first kiss. We had been out on a bunch of dates throughout the summer and into the fall. I was living in a microscopic studio apartment near school, in Chicago’s South Loop. The apartment was very small, like Amy herself. The kitchen was Manhattan size. My futon bed lived under the table in the main room. That’s where I slept, under that table. The wall was covered with a huge chart I’d written out of the rule against perpetuities, an obscure probate precedent that I had to learn for the bar exam, with absurd phrases like “fertile octogenarian” and “unborn widow.”
Amy and her ever-present brown backpack had come to visit. This wasn’t just any backpack. This thing had a history. She’d bought it in Greece during her college semester abroad, and you knew it had stories to tell. (It collected a lot more of them, since she kept right on carrying it for the next twenty-seven years.)
When the time came for her to leave, she slung the backpack over her shoulder, and I walked her to the door. As we stood in the open doorway, I moved in to kiss her, during which that big old bag slid off her shoulder and crashed, yanking her whole arm down with it.
It didn’t stop us.
I’d planned a trip to celebrate the bar exam being mercifully over with. I was going to get in my VW and drive to the East Coast—first to Washington, DC, where I went to college; on to the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard, where I had some friends; and then on to Boston and Buffalo. The trip lasted a few weeks. At this point, it felt like Amy and I were on solid footing in the relationship. Perhaps part of what brought clarity was the separation, my time to reflect on what was happening between us. I wanted her in my life, but thoughts of marriage, etc., were not in my mind. Amy and I corresponded during my trip. Good old-fashioned handwritten letters.
What is it about letters? Is it just the knowledge that physically putting a writing instrument to a piece of paper is a deliberate act, a gesture that requires forethought, and some intentional planning? Am I just old-fashioned? The more we communicate these days without writing at all—emojis, for example, and an endless stream of mystifying acronyms—the more meaningful the process of actually sitting down and writing a letter feels to me. Even emails, which now have algorithmic automatic response mechanisms, are hastily, carelessly written and sent, grammatical errors be damned.
Courtesy of Tom Lichtenheld
Writing letters to Amy felt good, as if I was sharing my world with her in a literal and emotional way. And receiving letters from her was exciting on several levels, from the anticipation of opening the mailbox to the sight of her handwriting to the joy of sitt
ing down to soak up her words.
An excerpt from a letter entitled “Monday,” for example:
I am thinking about you. Kind of a lot. (How can I not with Raphael perched on top of my computer?!) Love, Amy R. Krouse.
(Raphael, by the way, was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle I’d given her, for some reason I can’t begin to remember.)
Or this very typical AKR passage:
We’ve got other things to chat about. What, I don’t know. But there’s got to be something. Birds. Apples. Tennis. Hiccups. Lima beans. Gladiators. Free association. It’s bound to lead to something. Porcupines. Nuts. Bambi. Tolstoy! That’s it. Ya. Tolstoy. Great guy, Tolstoy. A bit verbose though. Ya, forget him. O.K. Pizza. Pencils. Key chain. How glad I am you’re in my life. Door knob. Fog.
With all this correspondence, I had an epiphany: I wanted to bring Amy out to Cape Cod. After conspiring with her friend Renee, I sent Amy eleven roses and a plane ticket. I enclosed a note in the box of flowers, telling her that the twelfth rose and I would be waiting for her when she arrived at the airport in Boston.
Mission accomplished. It was definitely a leap of faith for both of us. We didn’t know each other that well, after all. But we both had a sense that something special was happening, and that visit to Cape Cod settled it for both of us.
When I returned to Chicago, Amy and I dove deep into our relationship. We were so damned compatible. It was easy to be with this person. I talked to my mom, and she asked me to tell her what I liked about Amy. I remember answering, “Well, she’s tiny, and we fit together so nicely.”
That was certainly true. But the long answer was that she was a strong, independent woman. She was crazy smart and funny. Her smile was so infectious that it drew people to her, including me, obviously. She had lifelong friends. She was focused on her career. She loved music, art, and reading. She was devoted to her family, and they were so close to one another. And eventually I met that family.
My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me Page 1