Hope you’re ready for a good, long cry, because it’s coming your way fast.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, if you’re not familiar with her work, is a bestselling author. She’s written several children’s books, but she’s also written a couple of memoirs.
But her latest work could very possibly be her last work, and that’s because Amy has ovarian cancer and isn’t expected to live very much longer.
The work in question is an essay written for the New York Times titled “You May Want to Marry My Husband.”
Because this woman has been married for over two decades, and she is such an unbelievable gem that she’s spending some of her last moments looking out for her husband.
See what we mean about the crying?
“I have been trying to write this for a while,” she begins, “but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains.”
“Still,” she writes, “I have to stick with it, because I’m facing a deadline, in this case, a pressing one. I need to say this (and say it right) while I have a) your attention, and b) a pulse.”
Amy says that she’s married to “the most extraordinary man,” and while they’ve been married for 26 years, “I was planning on at least another 26 together.”
She then explains that on the same day their third and youngest child left for college, she and her husband went to the emergency room for what they thought was appendicitis but what turned out to be ovarian cancer.
“So many plans instantly went poof,” she writes — no international adventures with her husband or her parents, no writers’ residencies.
“This is when we entered what I came to think of as Plan ‘Be,"” she continues, “existing only in the present. As for the future, allow me to introduce you to the gentleman of this article, Jason Brian Rosenthal.”
Yep, so let’s kick the heartache up a notch.
Amy writes that her husband Jason is “an easy man to fall in love with,” and she knows because she did it in one day — on a blind date when they were 24 years old.
Though she’s never been on any dating sites, she takes a stab at creating a dating profile for Jason — she calls him a “sharp dresser” with “a flair for fabulous socks,” she says that he’s “uncannily handy” and “man, can he cook.”
She says he’s a wonderful father to their three children, and that “he showed up at our first pregnancy ultrasound with flowers.”
She then goes into a story about how she had a contest in which her fans could submit ideas to her for matching tattoos, and whichever submission she picked, she would get that tattoo with that person.
In the end, she chose a simple tattoo: the word more. Her reader picked it because she’d once written it was the first word she ever said as a child, but now it has deeper meaning.
“I want more time with Jason,” she says. “I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights.”
“But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet. So why am I doing this?”
She explains “I am wrapping this up on Valentine’s Day, and the most genuine, none-vase-oriented gift I can hope for is that the right person reads this, finds Jason, and another love story begins.”
“I’ll leave this intentional space below as a way of giving you two the fresh start you deserve.”
After that blank space, she closed her essay by writing “With all my love, Amy.”
What a woman. What a wife. What an incredibly thoughtful, selfless human being.
And now for those tears …