This collection of 150 sonnets takes us through the journey
from the writer’s wife’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s, eventually complicated by
dementia and overmedication, to her death and his early days of grieving. Married for over 40 years and close
companions, their successive separations deal new blows as they happen: She
goes into skilled nursing care, gets lost in delusions, and becomes more frail
and erratic, finally succumbs after a fall and a short period in a coma. The writer draws on biblical metaphors and
threads memories of their earlier life together in fleeting images so that the
reader is left to infer from glimpses a rich and happy marriage that, he
reflects, prepared them—but not enough—for this going.