My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me A Memoi- Jason B. Rosenthal

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