3
" I just want to say this, he said, before we walk back to our cars. I know who you could be with. Someone rich, someone fancy, some guy your sister finds for you. But I know who you should be with. You should be with a guy who doesn’t mind that you’re smarter than he is, who doesn’t mind that most of the time, you’ll be the main event. You need to be with a guy who supports how hard you work and who’ll bring you a cup of coffee late at night. I don’t know if I can be that guy, he said, tears in his eyes, but I’d like a shot. We married. "
― Amy Bloom , In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
4
" would like to have some heartfelt, leaf-shaking conversations, the way I imagine some people get to, at the end of life. (I imagine this despite having sat at multiple deathbeds, at which there definitely were no last-minute confessions, assertions, or expressions of deep feeling. The people dying were often in pain and exhausted or heavily medicated. My father patted my hand and thought I was my mother. My mother grabbed my arm and said, Jesus, honey, do something about the pain. As my old man used to say, frequently, regarding my expectations: the triumph of hope over experience.) "
― Amy Bloom , In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
8
" One of his great pleasures is overdoing it with the groceries, involving several stops at little markets, cheese shops, the East Haven lady who makes her own Thai BBQ sauce and fries up a bag of plantains for him while he waits. At our old house, we had a refrigerator just for condiments. Even now, my older daughter always says, How can you be only two people and never have an empty fridge? That’s Brian, I say, buyer of burrata, soppressata, Meyer lemons, white peaches, Benton’s ham. "
― Amy Bloom , In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
19
" What Yvonne manages to do, in the days after Brian’s diagnosis and in the days after Brian’s death, is to locate herself exactly where all the guide-to-grief people say she should be. At home, by herself, with her daughters or with friends, she lets herself be a mother awash in grief. We have one brief phone call in which she weeps to me that she just wanted more of him, and I feel so much the same way that instead of comforting her, as I intended, I just weep with her and then we mumble our goodbyes into our wet phones. With us, and then later with me, she doesn’t center her grief. She’s careful not to cry first or loudest and she rarely refers to her own loss. She is, as Brian says, a fucking class act. "
― Amy Bloom , In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
20
" I’m waiting in the living room, pretending and knowing that I will be caught and that I am not a widow, I’m just a weeping and annoyed wife. Brian will be gone from my life soon, although I don’t yet know how soon, and he’s also still a man with a cold. It’s a cold, not pleurisy, is what I think, even as I am tearing the fringe off a pillow at the thought of his not being upstairs any longer, not having a cold, not being a sick man than whom there is no one sicker, as I have said to him. One time, I said that I had friends with metastatic breast cancer who complained less about that than he did about his cold. And then he won’t be there for me to say it to him. "
― Amy Bloom , In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
