A memoir of a life stuffed full with love and of losing someone special---someone so close you wonder if you’ll be able to breathe on your own once they’re gone. The first 100 pages or so read like a Harlequin romance, complete with stifling sentimentality and rose colored glasses. The writing feels class-practiced and hyperbolic - Glenda tells us that her lover turned husband looks like Gregory Peck and has the wit of Mel Brooks – and descriptions of nature and good wine are shared like intimacies but leave the reader limp and disengaged in this deep and narrow world of love supreme.
But things change for Glenda and her husband, Ken. 15 years into their happy marriage and family life Ken is diagnosed with cancer, first thought to be lung cancer, then abdominal. Ken is still described in larger than life terms by his loving wife but now the descriptions seem to better fit the man. Ken is on a collision course with a death force, and although the statistics are against him he dives soul first into the battle. Glenda too becomes more present to the reader now, we see her courage, her grace as a caretaker, and understand her desperate need for science or God to explain and reverse Ken’s fate. “Closing my eyes I prayed for a miracle. Prayer..A song in the face of loss”.
The book also deals with other sides of Glenda and Ken’s lives: her mother’s cancer, his vindication in his previous’ wife’s murder, and his relationship with his troubled daughter Jordan. Glenda’s love for Ken, however, is her focus, and his struggle with cancer is the story she tells best.
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