Because of how many losses I've experienced in my personal life and because of my work as a hospice social worker, I've read a lot of books on grief and loss and I'm always up for reading more. As a society, we don't talk about death and grief enough so I want to find and support the people who do it well.

I wasn't familiar with Ruth Coughlin prior to this memoir but she's surely among the finest writers on this topic. I was blown away by her sparse prose and precise wording.

Ruth and Bill were friends for 14 years and married for 9. He died of cancer in 1992, about 10 months after he was diagnosed. The book focuses primarily on those final 10 months and intersperses those recollections with her experience of grief and memories of their relationship.

Ruth writes precisely about her grief, her pain rising off the page. Anyone who has lost a spouse will relate to the wild seesaw of emotions and the difficulty of figuring out a new normal, especially when you simply want the old normal to return.

"As far as I can tell there is only one certainty, a certainty as solid as the realization that he is dead, and it the sure knowledge that I have no learned, am continuing to learn, another language, the language of loss. Like the language of music and love, it is universal. You don't need a dictionary, you don't need a translator, you don't need a thesaurus. All you need do is go through it once, just once, to get it." p. 12

I did cringe at the lack of support before and after Bill's death. He was not on hospice, though he did have visiting nurses from Michigan Cancer Foundation, which appeared to be an uneven experience. Bill refused to discuss dying and his doctor would have more realistic conversations with Ruth privately so she was at least aware of the changes in his condition. This doesn't mean she was any more accepting of his decline. They didn't make funeral arrangements until after he died- advice to do so beforehand enraged her. And I can understand this but I also know refusal to talk about dying makes grief that much more harder and complicated. That's fully on display here and I wished they could have handled things differently, while knowing hospice wasn't as prevalent as it is now. They didn't have anyone to guide them through the hard conversations.

At the same time, plenty of people have access to hospice and bereavement care and still refuse to have the hard conversations. Regardless, the way Ruth writes about grief is so honest and true, I'd recommend it to anyone. Those who have been widowed may find comfort in seeing someone else make sense of the senseless.

I don't really have the words to review this, one day after my mother's funeral. Just know that even 25 years later, this book still speaks.

Ruth is a widow unfortunately to her husband William who sadly passed away from cancer. At the beginning of the book, we learn about how Ruth is coping with everything which is plain and obviously coated with sadness. They had a life together in a marriage for over three decades, having that one person there for you everyday to going to having the other partners belongings everywhere but not them, not their physical presence, is a totally relatable and honest situation.

Ruth describes her husbands battle as he went through chemotherapy to help prolong his life and how it did shrink the liver tumor at first. It's unfortunate that liver cancer alike many other cancer forms often comes with a bleak diagnosis, however heartbreaking for the family and friends to accept.

Ruth and Bill went through so much together and in the book there are anniversaries remembered and happy times such as when Bill had his next novel published and celebrated with a party. Always managing to have as good a time as can be possible even when time is limited and unknown how long is left, Bill is an icon in the sense that the diagnosis didn't hold him back in his final months which is very admirable.

Heart wrenching and emotional, if you have been close to someone with terminal cancer as well, I hope you will read this book as well. I have had many family members in the past and currently fighting this horrible disease which takes so many from us each year. Thank you to the publishers for allowing me to review this book, its been emotional but worth it.