{"product_id":"it-must-have-been-moonglow-isbn-9780812967845","title":"It Must Have Been Moonglow","description":"In December 1998, after fifty-six years of marriage, Phyllis Greene went from being part of the lifelong unit of PhyllisandBob to being just plain Phyllis. As a way of coping with her feelings, she began keeping a journal. She realized her own reflections could speak to the thousands of women like her, each one with very different yet in some ways very similar day-to-day experiences. \u003cb\u003eIt Must Have Been Moonglow\u003c\/b\u003e chronicles the emotional roller-coaster of her experience in a collection of brief essays—like diary entries—that capture the sadness, the humor, and the triumphs all widows encounter. She writes with wit and insight about negotiating the logistics of an evening out with a group of single older women, none of whom drive very well; about handling the check when going to dinner with a couple; about grocery shopping for one; and about the miracle of friendships on the Internet and the blessings of family.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith a new final section featuring readers’ letters describing their own experiences of widowhood, \u003cb\u003eIt Must Have Been Moonglow\u003c\/b\u003e is an intimate, candid, and engaging book—not about grief but about inspiration and strength.“Reading Greene’s book is akin to having someone to share a smile and a knowing laugh with.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Warm and down-to-earth” —\u003ci\u003eColumbus Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Deeply candid, personal, bittersweet.” —\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003ePhyllis Greene is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College. She has had a lifelong involvement in her community, having served as chairman of the board of trustees of Franklin University as well as chairman of the Columbus Metropolitan Airport and Aviation Commission. She is the mother of Bob Greene, the syndicated columnist and author; D. G. Fulford, author and journalist; and Tim Greene, a real estate executive. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003cbr\u003eJust Another Widow\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis afternoon, Mt. Carmel Hospice called for my six-month \"checkup.\"  How am I doing? they wanted to know. \"Well,\" I said. \"I am doing  well.\" Am I telling the truth, I wondered; what is \"well\"? What  sorrowing widow can ever really do well, I think. What standard does  hospice use? With all their experience, they must have some  definition of good and bad, well and unwell, heartsick and  heartbroken. Of one thing I am sure: What is well one day is sick at  heart the next, what is laughter one hour may be tears the next. In  an effort to chart my own road to acceptance (I think it is there,  somewhere ahead), I began to keep a journal on December 31, three  weeks after my husband's death. Now as I look back, I wonder if I  have walked a mile or one hundred, if I am out in front or lagging  way behind, is there a \"norm,\" and might it help me, and others who  may read this, to share my journey as I go? I would welcome the  company.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCircles on the Third Floor\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI avoided widowhood for fifty-six years. Bob and I tried really hard  to make it longer than that, and he could have given up or given out  any of the last ten, but he didn't. When he finally couldn't walk, or  even move by himself; when I had to feed him and clean him; when he  half-dreamed his own funeral and the \"plaque\" they would read, and  the \"people from Cleveland\" who would come; when we could assure him  that all the circles on the third floor were clean (although we have  no third floor), then he and I and our internist knew it was finally  time. The death certificate says the causes were cardiac arrest,  arteriosclerotic heart disease, diabetes mellitus Type I. What it was  was that everything just deteriorated, ravaged by diabetes and age  and the fact that his father, too, had died at eighty-three. So, in  December 1998, I joined that unhappy band of women that has been  growing like a geriatric sorority, and I became just another widow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLooking back, all the way back to my teen years, I find so many  different Phyllises as the years passed. I can see her, and almost  feel her, but it is hard to get the true picture of what she was like  as she moved forward (she hopes forward) through the physical changes  and the cultural changes and the scientific and medical changes,  through the feminist movement and the political upheavals. The one  constant: for the last fifty-six years she has been Bob's wife.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll marriages have moments of great joy and great pain, the  relationship changes over every decade, every day, and who I am now,  who any of us are at the end of a marriage compared to who we were at  the beginning is hard, even impossible, to get a handle on. I was a  war bride, and while my husband was overseas I worked at a good and  stimulating job as a fashion advertising copywriter for a department  store. It was all new for me. I think there was a career, out in that  exciting world, that we now call PR or media relations or marketing.  But in 1945 I wanted none of that. I wanted a home in the suburbs and  I wanted a baby. And then another and then another. We fit the  statistical pattern perfectly: the house, the mortgage, the backyard  barbecue, and my Major home from the war. A normal life, a  conventional storybook, until suddenly it's time to write the last  chapter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat we always said to one another, especially as we came down the  final stretch, was that we had had a helluva ride. This memory of our  life that we ran over and over in our minds and conversations in the  last year or two was the nourishment that gave us the strength to  accept that it couldn't go on forever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eHis Tan Poplin Suit and Red Stripe Tie\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is Paul Harvey who says \"And now for the rest of the story,\" which is a good lead for breaking news. My story, actually, has no \"rest,\"  it just goes on and on. The rest of the story will evolve day by day,  as long as I live.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI go through the necessary motions. I laugh some. I do shed some  tears. I am learning to accept that this is the way it is, that there  is almost nothing I can do except keep the faith, and walk through  the storm with my head held high, and whistle while I work, and speak  only soft answers to turn away wrath-and check my Bartlett's Book of  Quotations for more clichés. For every widow there is a timetable,  and \"recovery\" comes to each one on a different schedule and in a  different way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust as recovering alcoholics are never free from the desire for a  drink, so, too, am I, a recovering griever, never free of my desire  for the life I had before. There just aren't any twelve steps that  help. Nevertheless, with determination and reliance on the love and  goodwill of friends and family, there are tolerable days and a window  still on life's joys.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt seems incredible that months have passed and it is the bad  memories of the last year of my marriage that are still so much  clearer in my mind than the good memories of those many years that  came before.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I can reclaim those years, when the children were young and we  lived in our lovely, traditional home, where we ate breakfast in a  sunny breakfast room and ate dinner together every night, when Bob  came home from work each evening to find his family awaiting his  arrival, then I will know I am at least moving down that recovery  road.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is one picture in my mind of Bob that I return to over and over  again. We are going out to dinner; his mother is here visiting us. We  have driven to the top of the little hill and out of the driveway.  Bob notices that he has forgotten to turn the pool sweep off, and so  he goes down to turn the switch. As he comes back up the hill, in his  tan poplin suit and his repp stripe tie and his blue button-down  shirt, tan and healthy, with his great smile, I know that once and  forever God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, my  never-changing mantra.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I say \"Bob,\" and that is the picture that flashes into my mind  and heart, then, perhaps, I can say that I am recovered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDear Diary\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor me, the written word is the quintessential medium. From grocery  lists to condolence messages to letters to friends or to the children  at camp or for birthdays, it's the most effective way to express  myself. Over the years, each time that Bob got sick, I would write a  few words in the evening to remind me of how the day had gone. Each  time he was in the hospital, I would come home and write. What was  for me a tension release became, also, my medical log. By the time I  had a computer, I had actual files of illnesses and operations, even  one called Hive History, reporting when and how that chronic itch  kept recurring. Bob got sick-really sick-the day after Labor Day,  went to the hospital for tests and came home a bedridden,  kidney-failing, medically complex, probably incurable, accepting good  sport of a man. He died on December 12 after three horrible months  that left us all heartbroken and devastated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the days after Bob's death, I gave no thought to writing anything  other than thank-you notes for condolences. I was so busy, greeting  visitors and talking to lawyers, talking to accountants, talking to  the VA, being sure that we had someone to shovel snow. The mundane  things were taking a lot of time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs much as I enjoy writing, I would never have kept a daily journal  after Bob died if I hadn't received my granddaughter Maggie's  beautiful Christmas gift, a hardbacked journal, spiral-wire bound so  that the lined pages lie flat for writing. On the cover there is the  title One Day at a Time and a drawing of a lovely-looking older  woman, in a big black hat, kneeling in her garden, tenderly holding a  small plant in her hand, a not-so-subtle suggestion that she is  probably a widow. The hat is the giveaway, that and the unmistakable  sad expression. I got the message: Plant your small thoughts and they  might help you heal and grow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt first I thought it was a unique experience for me to find solace  in writing my nightly entries. Once the tips-for-healing began  arriving in the hospice mailings, it dawned on me that these journal  jottings might be a comfort for others. Most of the published books I  found about widowhood did not really speak to me; there were not many  from a purely personal perspective. Thus, this book is just the  journal, magnified. It is helping me even as I hope it helps those  who might read it. We tackle our sorrow alone, but if we open  ourselves with sympathy and empathy, it is a much less lonely road.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat started as a very private project began to take shape in my mind  as something I could share, something for many of us, paddling away  in the same small, sad boat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMerchandise on State Street\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot that long ago, we, a couple, did what the funeral industry calls  \"preplanning.\" It required a weird combination of realism and common  sense with a kind of denial that what we were doing was ever really  going to be of any use. Die? Us? Of course we would-someday,  someday-just not in our foreseeable future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn November and December 1997 there was a promotion to plan and  prepay your funeral, advertised by the Schoedinger Funeral  organization, which has, for the last hundred years, buried almost  everyone we know. If it didn't seem exactly a lark to go ahead and  make these arrangements, it was not a depressing thing to do. In  fact, everyone seemed to be doing it, saying at dinner get-togethers  that they had been downtown to the State Street chapel to talk to  Dave or Jay, the Schoedingers currently in charge. I had served on  boards and committees with both of them, and Bob was a good friend  and fellow Rotarian of the retired senior Schoedinger, John.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe rationale for doing this was to save our children some onerous  decision making when they would be grieving. So down to State Street  we went, and we filled out all the forms and even chose the  \"merchandise\" (merchandise!): the casket, the urn, the cremation box.  As we wandered around the second floor of the chapel, we thought it  best not even to think of the implications, but just to get it done.  And we did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe chose a cemetery plot, too, and ordered headstones. And then it  was all put in a file for what we hoped would be a long, long time.  One year later, I pulled out the file for Bob, and his plan became  operational.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe had assumed, I think, that there was a tax, as well as an  emotional, advantage to all of this. There was, of course, neither.  When it came time to list funeral expenses to be paid by the estate,  we couldn't include the prepayment because it would have to be offset  by the asset of owning the plan! If the prepayment was supposed to be  a hedge against inflation, that didn't work for Bob, although it may  for me. It came to be something that just was. Like the death itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI go to the cemetery now and am not sure I like the plot we chose,  one of many that have belonged to my family for years. I know I do  not like the headstone that bears both of our names. Somehow that  macabre fact escaped me in the planning, but we have one grave,  therefore one stone. At least my death date hasn't the inscription  \"19-,\" because 2001 is already here and, all things being equal, to  have inscribed the wrong century for my death would have been bad  planning indeed.[quote]--Kirkus Reviews With a new Afterword including correspondence from readers","brand":"Villard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301312385253,"sku":"NP9780812967845","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812967845.jpg?v=1767730237","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/it-must-have-been-moonglow-isbn-9780812967845","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}