Life changed dramatically for Diane O’Brien the January night in 2017 when her husband, Wally, died. The next morning was a Monday, the day her Pilot column, This Week in Lincolnville was due. Somehow the article got written carrying the news of her personal cataclysmic event, and continued to get written for every week of the year that followed.

The weekly column still carried school news, library doings, and town committee meetings, but now each began with an increasingly personal recounting of the nearly 50 year marriage that death had ended.

I’m kneeling on the bathroom floor trying to remember how to scrub a toilet. I haven’t done this for decades. It was an agreement we’d come to the way so many of our disputes ended: I out-talked him. “There are four of you, one of me” I pointed out, “and I sit to pee.” Little boys and even grown men don’t always bother much with aim. He had no answer for that. And that’s how he got toilet-cleaning duty. . . .

The cards, the wonderful cards from everywhere, the ghastly medical papers that I eagerly toss on the throw-out pile, the myriad notes-to-myself of all the stuff there is to do. When, this Monday morning, the power went out at 4 just as I was getting up, I sat at the table by kerosene light and sorted. It felt good. . . .

I look out across the road and pretend I can see the glimmer of his blaze orange jacket moving through the trees, down off Frohock Mountain. Every hunting season for the 46 years we’ve lived here I’ve watched, sometimes anxiously, for that flash of orange. Safe, he’s safely home again. . . . .  

Walking the dog alone on Ducktrap Road this morning, and we’re 30 years old again. He’s coming up the road with his cow, leading her home by her horns, after a wild chase through our woods to Tanglewood Corner, she with her udder flying and he cursing at the top of his lungs right behind her. Now the two of them are doing the walk of shame, all the way home. . . . .

She says now that she felt guilty pouring out her grief onto readers that probably would prefer hearing about the goings on in their town. But instead people began urging her to keep writing about it, as if by living vicariously through this experience they could see how it would be for them when their turn came.

“I figured I was just speaking to other old women, widows like me,” she says now.

But positive comments were coming in from men too, as well as younger women. When a 30 something male clerk said one day, “Diane, I love your writing. Keep it up!” she knew she was onto something. So for the rest of that year she wrote about the emptiness left when a partner dies, about the ways she filled the days, and as the months went by, about the re-emergence of a self, long locked in to “we”.

By the end of the year she knew the 52 columns could be turned into a book. Using a free online publishing site, Lulu.com https://www.lulu.com/ it took several months of early morning time at the computer to produce Half of Every Couple, When Death Ends Marriage.

As much a story of a marriage as the first year of widowhood, the book retains the details of life in Lincolnville, Maine. Their marriage played out in the same house they started out in, and that house emerges as the third character in their drama. By the end it’s being renovated into two dwellings, downstairs for Diane, upstairs for middle son Ed, Tracee and their three children.

Photos from family albums pop up throughout the text, while the cover was designed around a son’s blue eye enlarged to become the background. Local readers may spot themselves or their neighbors as the story plays out.

Half of Every Couple is available as both an ebook and print book here https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Half+of+Every+Couple&type=