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50th Wedding Anniversary

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes, 59 seconds
Jan Lilien and Richard Brown, Wedding Day, August 9, 1975

Jan Lilien and Richard Brown, Wedding Day, August 9, 1975

Love Letter to Jan!

When I was younger, I loved the idea of writing a letter to my future self. Imagine if I had penned one on our wedding day! It would have arrived today, inviting me to pause and celebrate our amazing first fifty years together. Love truly is a beautiful journey, unfolding at its own pace—just like an anniversary that beautifully surprises us when the moment comes. Here’s to all the wonderful memories we’ve created along the way!

If I could write a letter on our fiftieth anniversary, I would like it to reach Jan before she began hospice care. In it, I would express my heartfelt gratitude for her love, which has guided me through both life and grief. Her spirit continues to uplift me, and I want her to know that I’m doing well, carrying her love with me every day.

August 9, 2025

My dearest Jan,

Today would have been our fiftieth wedding anniversary! My heart is overflowing with happiness, and I can’t help but wish you were here to bask in this special occasion. Yet, as we’ve discovered through our journey together, life often takes unexpected turns. Even though you are only with me in spirit, I treasure the countless memories we’ve woven together and the profound love that binds us—true love is indeed everlasting.

Elyssa and Mike's Wedding
Elyssa and Mike’s Wedding

I’m also over the moon to share some remarkable news: both Jon and Mike have found their soulmates and are now married, embarking on their journeys of love! It brings me so much happiness to think about the time you spent with Karen and Elyssa; you would be so proud to see that you’ve become a grandmother to three beautiful grandchildren!

Lilah is flourishing in high school, shining just as you did in your younger days! She’s been eagerly joining me at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, where we both revel in the captivating plays and cherish our wonderful moments together.

Wes, our first grandson, arrived just fourteen months after your passing, and Mike and Elyssa chose Jude as his middle name to cherish your memory. Little Jack, our youngest, brings back such fond memories of Mike in his toddler days! I’m dedicated to ensuring they both feel your enduring love and warmth every single day.

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve moved to a cozy little apartment right next door! It’s the right size for me now, even though it’s too small for both of us. Downsizing again has helped me prioritize what matters most. While I miss you, I’m excited for this new chapter in my life.

Contrary to your worries, I’ve found a strong network of relationships that have filled my life with comfort and strength. Some are familiar faces, while others are new friends and neighbors. Their support has made this transition a much brighter experience, and for that, I am incredibly grateful!

Reflecting on our last heartfelt conversation about your concerns about my happiness and companionship. You might find it surprising, but living independently has become an exciting adventure of self-discovery, rather than a feeling of loneliness. For fifty-one months and six days, I have cherished the incredible gift of your love, which inspires me to share joy with everyone I meet. Each new day greets me with enthusiasm, and I find delight in the small things, like saying, “Good morning!” and marveling at how beautiful today is. I still tell everyone that “You are my only friend.”

I can almost hear your laughter as you playfully tease me about my quirky ways! It’s true, my love. By connecting with others and fully embracing life’s moments, I’ve discovered a fantastic way to experience both joy and grief.

Embracing life through walking, reading, volunteering, and worshiping feels like a beautiful tribute to you and the only path to living fully. Walking can often be a solo journey; some refer to me as the infamous walker, but your spirit walks beside me. I want you to know that each book I delve into sparks a desire to share insights with you. We’ve welcomed a new rabbi, Rav Uri, whose message truly resonates with me and has been instrumental in reigniting my faith. It’s such an exciting time of growth and connection for me, a testament to the enduring impact of our love, shared life purpose, and community involvement!

In heartfelt remembrance of you, I worked with family, friends, and neighbors to create a beautiful memory garden. I can envision us walking hand in hand through Hanson Park, and I can almost hear your curious voice asking about this special tribute. This garden truly means the world to me! The wind sculpture represents peace, solitude, and reflection, while the plaques on the two benches ensure that those who visit the garden remember and say your name. This vibrant garden stands as a joyful testament to our love, celebrating all the wonderful moments we’ve shared and filling my heart with hope and positivity as we honor the beautiful legacy we created together.

Love Never Dies

Every year, I make a meaningful journey to the top of the twenty-six-story Gateway Center in Newark to honor your memory. This year’s Big Climb, on April 26, held extra significance as it would have been your seventy-fifth birthday. While I understand I can’t bring you back, I find solace in this endeavor and uniting support for the fight against cancer. This year, I proudly raised nearly $11,000!

Your battle with blood diseases has profoundly inspired me, fueling my commitment to advance the search for cures. I embrace the powerful mantra: CLIMB, CONQUER,CURE CANCER! As long as I am able, I will participate in the Big Climb.

I have continued our work to repair the world! Serving as the board chair for Bridges fills me with purpose and enthusiasm, and I cherish the connections I’ve formed with our temple and community organizations—they feel like family to me. Together, we engage in impactful social initiatives that align with our values. Receiving the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Service Award from the Cranford Clergy Council earlier this year was an incredibly touching moment, and it inspires me to continue our meaningful work!

You know, I never chased after wealth, but the love we shared has proven to be the richest treasure of all. Love is timeless and profoundly transformative.

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Piranesi

Read: May 2022

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Piranesi: A Novel by Susanna Clarke

by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is about a man known as Piranesi who lives in a big house and explores the labyrinth of rooms and hopes of understanding the meaning. Is it any surprise that I would pick this book as my thirtieth of the year? As a widow, I journal and journey in a life I did not expect to live, and I still believe I will find meaning and purpose. 

In addition, a labyrinth is one of the options we have discussed for the next phase of the work in Hanson Park.

Piranesi is a page-turner, but that does not fully describe the beauty of the world that Susanna Clarke created. I highly recommend this book as it is one of my best this year. 

The Goodreads summary provides an overview of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.

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King of Ashes

Read: July 2025

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King of Ashes: A Novel

by S. A. Cosby

Today, as heavy thunderstorms rumbled outside and flash flood warnings loomed, I dove into “King of Ashes,” a gripping Southern crime saga that draws inspiration from “The Godfather.” Written by the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby, this novel was a long-awaited treat for me. I read “All the Sinners Bleed” nearly two years ago and have been itching for Cosby’s next masterpiece ever since.

As I turned the pages, the opening paragraphs immediately pulled me in and confirmed that the wait was worthwhile. The summoning of eldest son Roman Carruthers’ home after his father’s car accident not only sets the stage for a gripping plot but also resonates with the universal theme of family. He finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident, and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a knack for numbers and a talent for making his clients wealthy, has some money to help his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself and his own particular set of financial skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared under mysterious or suspicious circumstances when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.

S. A. Cosby is a New York Times bestselling writer from southeastern Virginia. He is the author of All the Sinners Bleed, which was on more than forty Best of the Year lists, including Barack Obama’s, as well as Edgar Award finalist Razorblade Tears and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Blacktop Wasteland. He has also won the Anthony Award, ITW Thriller Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, BCALA Award, and Audie Award. He has been longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

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Midwives

Read: June 2022

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Midwives: A Novel

by Chris Bohjalian

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian is “a compulsively readable novel that explores questions of human responsibility that are as fundamental to our society now as they were when the book was first published.” Forty years after the book was published, it is just as relevant, if not more so. Indeed, the book’s topics are more relevant today with the current set of decisions by the Supreme Court.

After reading The Pull of the Stars and watching every season of Call the Midwives, this was the logical next book for me to read. It is also one that I know Jan read and liked. 

I highly recommend this book!

The Goodreads summary provides a concise overview. 

The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby’s life. She performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to have died in labor. But what if—as Sibyl’s assistant later charges—the patient wasn’t already dead, and it was Sibyl who inadvertently killed her?

As recounted by Sibyl’s precocious fourteen-year-old daughter, Connie, the ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt except that all its participants are acting from the highest motives—and the defendant increasingly appears to be guilty. As Sibyl Danforth faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her conscience, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the best novels ever do. 

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The Vanishing Half

Read: September 2021

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The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was a true page-turner, and I did not want to stop reading it even when I got to the last page. I am not a fan of sequels, but if I was ever going to change my mind, this is the book I would want to read a sequel.

Ms. Bennett focuses on two twins who run away from home at age 16. They have grown up in Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana. “In Mallard, nobody married dark,” Bennett writes starkly. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.” The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have delighted the town’s founder. One of the women chooses to pass as white while the other does not.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

The question of why people choose to live differently than their origins is one that I often ponder. Growing up in a small town and living in a metropolis raises questions for me as to what my life is now and what was once.

I strongly recommend this book.

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Aftermirth

Read: August 2022

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Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan

by Hillary Jordan

Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan is a book about grief as the two protagonists take a road trip that is a darkly funny journey of healing that takes them deep into the heart of their suffering and others, and then beyond it, to a place of peace and laughter. I had just finished reading When She Woke by Ms. Jordan and having enjoyed that book, reading a second one by the same author seemed reasonable.

When I selected this short novel to read, I questioned if it was a good choice for me.

I found it easier to read and, in some ways, helpful. It was like meeting fellow widows from my Zoom grief groups in person at Camp Widow. The ability to laugh about our loss and cry openly is essential to meeting fellow benefits.

Michael Larssen, the narrator, raised a question I have not and still do not want to consider. What if I am still alive, Jan was a great love but is not the love of my life?

“You can’t know that he was the love of your life, and do you know why? Because guess what, you aren’t dead yet. You may feel dead right now, and believe me I’ve been there, but the fact is, until you’re lying under a tombstone of your own you can’t be sure about anything. You could prick your finger on one of your roses tomorrow, and as you’re climbing the stairs to get a Band-Aid, you trip over one of the pugs and tumble to your death. Or you could meet a man in the checkout line at the grocery store–hell, you could meet a woman even and fall madly in love with her and end up with six kids and twenty grandkids. Michael looks over at Elena, then back at George. You just don’t know, George. That’s the thing. None of us does.”— Aftermirth (Kindle Single) by Hillary Jordan

Despite my anxiety about considering this disturbing question, I highly recommend Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

I stopped being funny the day my wife was electrocuted by her underwire bra.” So begins “Aftermirth,” a dark comedy that explores the absurdity of death through the eyes of thirty-one-year-old comedian, writer, and actor Michael Larssen. What is funny to the rest of the world is devastating to Michael, who loves his wife deeply, exceptionally her bright, rippling, abandoned laughter, which captivated him from the first time he heard it. In the aftermath of her death, he loses his sense of humor and his career.

Then, after two years of mourning her, he sees an article in the paper about a factory worker named Julio Santiago who fell into a giant vat of dough and was kneaded to death. For reasons Michael doesn’t understand, he decides to go to the man’s wake. There he meets and bonds with Julio’s twenty-nine-year-old daughter Elena, a law student who is reeling from her father’s unexpected and preposterous death.

Three months later, she calls him out of the blue and suggests that the two of them drive to North Carolina to speak with another survivor like themselves Elena has found on the Internet. Their road trip is a darkly funny journey of healing that takes them deep into the heart of their grief and others and then beyond it to a place of peace and laughter.

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All Fours: A Novel

Read: May 2024

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All Fours: A Novel

by Miranda July

Today, I started reading All Fours: A Novel by Miranda July. A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel, a testament to her unique approach to fiction, confirms the brilliance of her storytelling. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

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