GHOSTING

A journal of grief and healing following a beloved husband's death.

Ascher, a memoirist and travel writer, met her older psychiatrist husband, Bob, when she was a college student. After 35 years of enviable closeness, in 2002, a cancer diagnosis ended his life at 77. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates in A Widow's Story, Ascher revisits the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Bob’s death, her loss, and the bewildering period that followed. Her often lovely writing freshens familiar observations: "Morning is among grief's cruelties because sleep swallows reality and then releases you to the news. You have to do this again and again before it’s no longer a surprise.” A list of sailing terms she learned in her many years as her husband's first mate, "once vital,” were now "relegated to the language of longing. A torch song." The author also writes about how her relationships with her adult children and their spouses—her daughter and Bob's children by a previous marriage—were consolidated during Bob's illness, offering strength and comfort. But after he was gone, she and her daughter became "a splintered girl group." Like many other bereaved people, Ascher often feels that Bob is present and sending her messages, usually via various avian appearances. She interprets these less as magical thinking than "cosmic winks.” Though her editor reminded her she was "not woo-woo,” she replied that she was “getting more so every day.” Many times, the author has thought about a comment made by a neighbor who had also lost a husband: "You'll think you're sane, but you're not." Though she had various gentlemen callers during the early days of her widowhood, it was more than 10 years later when she was called again to love's table. Did Bob show up in the form of a bird to express his opinion? You'll have to read the book.

An elegant, frank, and tender memoir.