BETTING ON BERNIE

Marks’ memoir offers an account of the joys and hardships of a more than five-decade-long marriage.

The author, a retired Spanish-language professor, met her future husband, Bernie, in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1965, when she was a freshman at Centenary College. The two were very different: He was a 27-year-old New Yorker from a secular Jewish background who’d never been out of the country; she was an 18-year-old Protestant Mississippian whose small family, due to her father’s Army officer career, had lived in many different places over the years. Although the two didn’t initially connect, they grew closer after long talks and tranquil dates. They married in 1968 and planned never to have children and to explore their personal and professional goals. She earned a doctorate from Northwestern University in 1978; he painstakingly built a retail advertising business. They had financial worries and disagreements over the course of their marriage, but they eventually settled, in the early 2000s, into comfortable retirement in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Bernie pursued his lifelong dream of becoming a fine artist. In 2011, however, Bernie collapsed while painting; an MRI revealed “unusual activity in the brain,” which was diagnosed as viral encephalitis. It was the beginning of a grueling fight; at one point, the author affectingly says, “I yelled at him…for the first and only time in my life, ‘You are not okay!’” The author includes personal black-and-white photographs throughout the text. Readers come to know the couple quite well, and even become acquainted with their pet cats over the years. Although some aspects of their professional lives make for less compelling reading, they effectively provide context before the difficult chapters in the book’s later portions. The author’s struggle to care for Bernie as he confronted various neurological problems will be particularly poignant for those who have gone through similar situations and will be edifying for those who have not. Overall, this is a memorable and touching account.

An intimate, honest remembrance of a long relationship and its difficult conclusion.