The Tear Harvester: Every Women Dreams of a Forever Love, Every Man Needs to be Someone's Hero

Leanne Bidloe dies of a barbiturate overdose in 1984, after finding her rock star husband, Smokey, passed out in a hotel bed with a former lover. She leaves a suicide note. The note begins and ends with the words "Goodbye my love, goodbye." At the funeral, he vows that once he raises their young son and records her Goodbye Song, he will follow her. At these words, he sees tears trickle down her cheeks as she lies in the open coffin. His five-year-old son chastises him for making his mother cry.

She had always loved and he had always detested country music. Yet he made a promise two years earlier: Following her death, he would write and record the country song she had begged for in her life. The writing of the lyrics begins at the funeral, and ends twenty-one years later. The story opens as he secretly records the song at the place where he proposed to her.

He drops off the recording at a country radio station, which is set to debut the song that night at 10:37pm, the exact time when Leanne died, twenty-one years (to the day) earlier. He goes to their tiny first house and sits on the bed where he found her on the day of her death. He places a bottle of barbiturates on the dresser beside the clock, and resets the stereo to the radio station. He plans his own death by overdose to occur as the song plays, on that twenty-first anniversary of her death. Her manifestation has repeatedly appeared to warn him not to follow her, but she couldn't change his mind.

During his three-hour wait for the song's debut, he relives portions of their tumultuous and often unearthly relationship, and the tragic chain of events that brought him to this place and time. …