Tales of Insomnia Despair & the Perfect Cocktail

On Columbus Day of 2010, the love of my life, my wife of fifteen years, died suddenly of a double pulmonary embolism. This is the story of a man shattered by loss who somehow comes back to life. It's a memoir and a survival guide, with humor and a breezy irreverent style that mitigates the sadness. It's about relationships and finding love again; about insomnia and a mind that won't go to sleep. And it's a love letter to my wife who's no longer here. And through it all, the quest for the perfect cocktail as an antidote to, as the subtitle says, "life's pummeling."

People who haven't experienced horrible loss in their life do not know that there is no manual for grief. That it is a faking-it-until-you-make-it kind of thing. And when the loss is so great to the point of it threatening to destroy the one who suffered it then that person must look everywhere for ways to save himself. So when I am at the gym, then being at the gym is the most important thing, and when I'm making a cocktail and having a few to forget, then this forgetting for a while is the most important thing. Yet behind it all is the loss that's always there, like this shadow or cloud or blanket ready to drop. What I tried to show is how I did it, how I had to reinvent myself because the old me no longer existed the way it did when Michelle, my wife, was alive. What I realized is that I must find or create luster in my life, or risk succumbing to the sadness of that dark blank space where Michelle used to be.