The poems that became this book were written to ease the mind of my wife, Cindy. She had just been operated on for pancreatic cancer. A close friend of ours had just died from the same disease, and it was not pretty. At this time we had been married for thirty-six years. Cindy still had a lot of residual pain from the surgery, and was very afraid to die. I wrote her a love poem, and that made her feel better. Soon, I was writing more. I wrote poems that were loving, silly, or funny, anything to make her happier.
Almost exactly a year later, I was in a motorcycle accident. It left me with a broken back, and eight ribs broken. I was in a cast which left me lying on my back for over four months. I became pretty good at writing on a notebook computer, with it resting on my cast, and up against my legs. Now we both had pain, and the poems brought us even closer.
Other than the time that my family doctor told me that I had cancer (which turned out to not be true), things went along fine for about eight months. Cindys doctor had his assistant call her to say that her most recent test results were back from the lab. Without any preamble or emotion, she told Cindy that her cancer was back, and there was nothing that could be done! Cindy looked as if she had been shot. Now I really had to write some words that would help her on her last journey. I wrote to tell her how much I loved her, and how much she would be missed.
The disease was consuming her body by this time, and she was becoming very weak. She continued on this downhill slide for approximately three months, until she finally required in-home hospice care. Her condition deteriorated considerably, but she still loved it when I read her my latest poetry. She started sleeping more and more, as she was having her pain managed with morphine. Our thirty-eighth wedding anniversary was August 20, and she managed to hang on until then. The next day, she slipped into a coma, and died four days later. I was beyond devastated.
Cindy had asked me to get married again, even enlisting the help of her many girlfriends to find me a suitable mate. Before her death, that was a funny story. Immediately afterward, it was unthinkable! My whole world fell apart with her death. Cindy used to be the brightest spot in my life, my beacon, without her I was lost.
I asked around, trying to find a grief counseling group, and found a grief sharing group run by a church. It totally worked! The people there all shared their grief with me, and I returned home feeling ten times worse. Many of these folks had lost a loved one from five to ten years before, but still cried at the mention of the departed person. I didn’t wish to be like them, so I decided to take action. I started in again on writing poetry, this time for me. It had worked with our pain, perhaps it would help with my suffering.
The first ones were rather dark, about loss and being alone. Gradually, they took a turn. They began to be about how happy I had been. Soon my poems were about being happy again. Quite a few of them were even whimsical; they had dragged me back from the brink of despair.
Instead of just being happy, I wanted to be in love again. Cindy was right; I would not do well alone. There were several ways for people to meet, but most of them wouldn’t work for me. I had seen ad for an online dating site, and decided to give it a try. There was a questionnaire which contained dozens of questions that were specially formulated to find matches for people, based on similar views of important subjects. I filled it out, and hoped for the best. I received several matches, and I started dating at a furious pace. It was crazy, I was going on eleven dates a week (one each weekday evening, three each, Saturday, and Sunday). It was tiring. Although I was going on so many dates, I was getting more matches than I could handle. I didn’t know what to do!
I became more selective in my judging of the respondents answers, and of their p
