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Love is Forever

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes, 30 seconds
Jan and Richard

Jan and Richard

She did not immediately respond. Jan said as we approached the stoop, “I am not seeing him anymore.”

I was surprised by this news. I mumbled something about being sorry Jan no longer had a boyfriend.

“I do have a boyfriend who is also my loving husband. I only want to be with you. Not just for today but forever,” she said.

As we got to the top of the stoop, we embraced and simultaneously said, “I love you!” Our kiss was deep and passionate, and it was as if we had never kissed before. We devoured each other’s lips with a pang of hunger we had not felt in weeks.

Over her shoulder, I could see Sal from the pizzeria give me a thumbs up. I was so happy to have her back that I floated up the stairs to our third-floor apartment. After opening the apartment door, I silently promised to love her and be my best husband.

After closing the door, we embraced for a long, sweet kiss!

All’s Well That Ends Well

There was never a doubt in my mind that she was the only one for me. I loved her the moment we met and will love her forever!

Perhaps all the cards, notes, and my repeated statements of love made no difference, but I believe they did. That is my story, and I am sticking with it. I think it so much that I still tell her every day that I love her, and my journal is how I leave her daily love notes. 

Love never dies; it only grows stronger.

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Neverhome: A Novel

Read: November 2024

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Neverhome: A Novel

by Laird Hunt

Today, I began reading “Neverhome: A Novel” by Laird Hunt, a critically acclaimed work that has garnered praise for its unique storytelling. The protagonist introduces herself as Ash, which is not her real name. She is the devoted wife of a farmer, yet she has left her husband to enlist as a Union soldier during the Civil War. “Neverhome” narrates Ash Thompson’s harrowing journey as she faces the chaos of battle in the South.

Amidst scenes of bloodshed, hysteria, and heartbreak, Ash undergoes a profound transformation. She evolves from a devoted wife to a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman, and, to some, a traitor to the American cause. This complex journey of self-discovery adds depth to her character and makes her story all the more compelling.

Laird Hunt‘s captivating novel illuminates the adventurous women who chose to fight rather than remain behind. It also presents a compelling mystery: Why did Ash leave while her husband stayed? This enigma, shrouded in the fog of war, keeps us intrigued and eager to uncover the truth. What challenges must she overcome to return to her husband?

In beautifully crafted prose, Hunt‘s rebellious young heroine battles her way through history. Her emotional journey, filled with longing, fear, and determination, resonates with us as she strives to return to her husband and captures our hearts.

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Flight: A Novel

Read: January 2023

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Flight: A Novel

by Lynn Steger Strong

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a novel about family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, forming a decisive next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time. The book has been on my to-read list for a few months. A New Yorker Best Books of 2022, it seemed like a good start on my 2023 Goodreads Reading challenge. Flight is the first book I read in 2023. Last year I read seventy-four books, and each helped me with my grief journey.

I recommend this novel as it is a page-turner highlighting the difficulty families experience after a loss. As a culture, we are experiencing declining social connections, including within families. Flight is an excellent effort to define the crisis.

Although several possible resolutions to the conflict became clear by the middle of the novel, Ms. Strong told the story so that until the end, it was unclear how or if it would be resolved. In addition, enough unresolved issues remained so that.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.

With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Revolutionary Mothers

Read: February 2019

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Revolutionary Mothers

by Carol Berkin

Revolutionary Mothers by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, is one of four books I purchased after my first One Day University Class on February 9, 2019. It should be required reading!

The book explains how women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers, and fathers died.

It was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. She explains the mystery of Molly Pitcher (she was not a person but a group of women), camp followers, women who spied for their country, Loyalist women, and the impact on African American and Native women.

This intelligent and comprehensive history brings these forgotten stories to their rightful place in the struggle for American independence. Dr. Birkin also highlights how their efforts set the stage for the continuing campaign for gender equality.

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Bug Hollow

Read: June 2025

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Bug Hollow: A Novel

by Michelle Huneven

“Bug Hollow” by Michelle Huneven is a decades-spanning family saga that follows the messy yet loving Samuelson clan as they navigate life after the loss of their son, Ellis. When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother, Ellis, went missing the summer after he graduated from high school. He eventually reappeared at the picturesque Bug Hollow, a final remnant of the beautiful Northern California counterculture of the seventies.

Although he found joy in communal life, his life was tragically cut short in a freak accident just weeks later, leaving the Samuelson family to grapple with their grief. From that point on, the world of the Samuelsons never spun on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, showed up pregnant on their doorstep.

Each member of the Samuelson family has sought their form of solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching to numb her pain after losing her beloved son; her husband, Phil, found comfort in a new love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high-achieving middle child, comes home to try to make peace with her mother following a cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, Sally has become the de facto caretaker of Eva, the child Ellis never had the chance to know.

Michelle Huneven is known for her five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her vividly portrayed native California. Her characters struggle with addiction, painful romances, and profound losses as they continue to seek meaning and strive to be good. She captures the Samuelson family with remarkable precision and deep empathy as they fracture and rebuild time and again.

Michelle Huneven is the author of Round Rock, Jamesland, Blame, Off Course, and Search. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Beard Award, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Chain Gang All Stars

Read: December 2023

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Chain Gang All Stars

by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Today, I started reading “Chain Gang All Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The story revolves around Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, the main characters of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, a highly controversial and top-rated program in America’s private prison industry. The program is called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE), where prisoners compete for the ultimate prize- their freedom. It’s similar to the return of the gladiators but in a modern-day setting.

The story is set in a prison called CAPE, where inmates are forced to participate in death matches as a part of a chain-gang. These matches are held in front of cheering crowds, while the prison authorities claim it to be a righteous act. Among the participants, Thurwar and Staxxx are the most popular as they are also lovers. Thurwar is just a few matches away from her freedom, which she carries with a heavy heart and lethal hammer. Thurwar contemplates how she can help her fellow inmates preserve their humanity despite being forced into these brutal games. However, the owners of CAPE are determined to safeguard their status quo, and they will go to extreme lengths to stop anyone who challenges them. Thurwar’s attempts to resist the system have devastating consequences.

Chain-Gang All-Stars” is a powerful book that sheds light on the American prison system’s problematic alliance with systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration. It critically examines the situation from various perspectives, from the Links in the field to the protestors, the CAPE employees, and beyond. The book offers a clear-eyed reckoning of what freedom really means in America. It is a noteworthy contribution from a “new and necessary American voice,” as described by Tommy Orange in The New York Times Book Review.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Regarding gifts made this month, I will match dollar for dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Read: October 2021

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Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May is “an intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.”

Two quotes that resonated with me were:

That’s what grief is – a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall upon us, revealing our bare bones. Given time they grow again.

May writes in a clear voice that conveys the importance of accepting the cycles of life instead of fighting them.

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a breakup, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath swimming in icy waters, and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the serene beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.

I recommend this book without reservation.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

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