Do You Owe Someone an Apology? It’s Never Too Late

As I was leaving the city of Chartres, France, late this past summer, heading for Paris and the airport to catch a plane home, I got an email message that John, my first husband, had died. The message was from an old friend of his who said he thought I should know that John had passed, and that I had remained important to him. I was surprised, as John hadn’t spoken to me since we split up decades ago except in terse written messages over legal matters. I thought he was still bitter. Understandably so. I had left wreckage behind in my pursuit of happiness.

I had left wreckage behind in my pursuit of happiness.

But even though I was the one who left, messily, after I fell deeply in love with Gary, one of our mutual friends, I was still holding my own share of bitterness. After Gary’s death in a kayaking accident on a wild river in Guatemala, I wrote a memoir about my year of pilgrimage to deal with my grief. It was well received, with five-star reviews, but one day I saw a review on Amazon that was one of the meanest reviews I had ever seen of any memoir. The reviewer, who gave it one star, said the book was a “sappy paen to a not very interesting person.”