This blog was like a suddenly abandoned house. I know the owner well — we met in New York City soon after arriving as immigrants to America. He wrote about it here.
As co-administrator, I logged right into his blog and saw this note scrawled on one of the private posts:
Prague, I remembered, was the city he and his wife loved the most in their travels throughout North America, Europe and Australia during their thirty years together.
He would be going there alone this time. He was pretty much inconsolable after Susan’s death. He wrote several posts about it, most recently here.
There was a large dose of guilt mixed with grief in his bereavement. “We had our differences,” he told me more than once about his relationship with Susan.
”It was a rocky marriage; we were apart some of the time,” he said, “but even when we weren’t together, we always kept in touch, every day, and I do believe we never stopped loving each other. I know I didn’t.”
I know he was a pretty good caregiver to her in the last three years of her life. He said he wasn’t and told me that when he apologized to Susan for not always “treating her right,” she said to him: “You know what you call that? Thirty years of marriage.”
That about summed it up, and that should have satisfied him, but the guy kept—and keeps, apparently—beating himself up over it. Maybe going to Prague will help, but I doubt it.
In any case, I’ll be filling in for him on American Daze Purple Haze until further notice.
— Guglielmo Michelini