Moving Forward, Looking Back

What becomes of a life built around one person when that person is gone? Beth Ann Blackwood addresses this question in a memoir that records her first year without her husband, Tom. She wrote it in real time, week by week, so the 52 chapters read as a running account of that year rather than a retrospective.

Each chapter has two halves. The first stays with the present. The second looks back over the thirty-two years she and Tom spent together, a relationship between two driven, Type A personalities that started out rocky. Those backward glances range across West Texas oil country, the political maneuvering of the Nixon years, high-pressure courtroom battles, and a series of medical setbacks.

Blackwood does not soften the grief. She describes the deep hole it left her in and the many ways she tried to climb out, drawing on memories of an imperfect, passionate partnership and on whatever practical tools she could find to build a new life. The book moves between love story, lament and cautious hope.

Readers who have been through a devastating loss of their own will likely find something familiar in these pages.