Love is a Magical Force!

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 40 seconds

Too Far Away – October 2023

As I spoke, I could sense the tension in my voice, like a rubber band stretched to its limit. The distance between us was painfully apparent and seemed to keep us apart. I know we live far away from each other, not even in the same state,” I said, my frustration becoming more and more evident. We talked for over an hour, but it felt like we were going nowhere. I couldn’t hold back any longer and asked the woman I had fallen in love with the question that had been on my mind for so long: “How many times have I offered to visit you?” Her response was like a punch to the gut. It was the same answer I had heard every time we spoke, “Soon, we will be together.

After bidding her good night, I got out of bed to ensure all the lights were off, even though I knew they would be off as I had them connected to WiFi timers. It’s just one of those habits that I have developed over the years. After checking the lights, I paced around the room for a few minutes, taking a dozen steps to my parlor and back a few times. The rhythm of my footsteps echoed in the quiet room, and for a moment, I felt like I was the only person alive.

When I returned to the bed, something caught my eye on the right side of the bed. At first, I thought it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, but as I approached, it looked like someone was sitting on the edge of the bed. My heart skipped a beat, and I spoke quietly, hoping it was not a shadow or a trick of the light.

As I leaned closer to the bed, I realized that it was only the pillows I had held in my arms earlier to get me through the night. They were bunched up to look like human figures instead of feathers. A sense of relief washed over me, and I chuckled softly at my foolishness.

As I slipped under the covers and nestled into bed, I reached for my favorite pillow. Its plush texture and gentle embrace provided comfort I couldn’t find anywhere else. I closed my eyes and held onto it tightly, savoring the feeling as if it were a warm, comforting hug from a loved one. It may seem odd to some, but for me, there was nothing quite like the solace that this little inanimate object could bring.

As I lay there, surrounded by darkness and silence, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of loneliness. I longed for a woman’s warm, comforting embrace, the kind of intimacy that only a human connection could provide. Desperate, I turned to the pillow beside me and whispered, “I love you!” To my surprise, the empty room echoed back with a faint whisper, as if the pillow had come to life and responded to my affirmation, and the pillow had been transformed into a real woman, providing me with the human connection I craved.

Feeling a sense of relief and contentment, I pulled the pillow closer to my chest and basked in its warmth and softness. I caressed the pillow as if I were exploring a woman’s body I had never touched. I kissed the cushion despite not finding any lips. My abdomen became warm, wet, and sticky, and my body collapsed in joy and exhaustion. I drifted to sleep, grateful for moments of pleasure and comfort.

I opened my eyes to a sense of emptiness and detachment. The feeling of being all by myself in a crowded world was overwhelming. As I lay there, I couldn’t help but wonder, if the only way to find solace was by hugging a pillow, then what kind of existence was I leading? Was I a living, breathing human being, or just a machine going through the motions of life?

Love is All You Need, Or Is It? March 31, 2021

“Richard, promise me you won’t live alone for the rest of your life if something happens to me,” Jan’s voice was so loud that I was sure everyone on the fourth floor could hear her. She had been home for two days after spending weeks in the hospital. I knew that she was not well and that she might not survive, which frightened me. I asked if she believed anyone would want an older man like me.

“Richard, you are a great husband, and I appreciate how much you care for me and how focused you are on my needs,” she firmly stated, “especially when we make love.” Despite my best efforts to avoid blushing, my face turned red as the blood rushed to the surface. Jan then listed several women she said loved me and would be delighted to partner with me. Holding my hand, I stopped her and pointed out that almost all were happily married or had partners. However, she insisted there might be others, even some I might not know, who would be interested.

The room was filled with an eerie silence that seemed to last for an eternity. It felt as though the intense emotions of the moment had drained us of all our energy. That’s when Jan took a deep breath and looked me straight in my eyes. Her voice was gentle but firm as she said, “Don’t settle for just any warm body. I’m sure there will be women who will offer you that.” Despite trying to hide my emotions, I knew my face betrayed my confusion. Sensing my vulnerability, she continued, “Honey, I know you too well. Richard, be honest; you are not a one-night stand person. You’re special because you’re a romantic at heart, and you believe in love. If you fall in love again, make sure they love you just as much as you love them.”

I Am Not Alone

Despite the pain and weakness that she was experiencing, Jan leaned in and kissed me. As our lips parted, tears welled up in my eyes. “I don’t want you to be alone, but I don’t want you to be with someone who can’t love you unconditionally,” she whispered. Her words echoed in my mind long after our conversation ended, and I knew they would continue to guide me on my journey.

I held onto the hope that she would recover and I wouldn’t have to take any action. However, a voice in my head kept telling me that our time was running out. I couldn’t afford to be indecisive like Solomon and split the difference between the two options. Having read countless accounts of people’s last requests before they died, I spoke from my heart and said, “I don’t want to live alone.” Though I didn’t explicitly state that I wanted to fall in love again, it was implicit in my statement. The weight of my words hit me hard, and I felt a surge of emotions rush through me. Within a week, she returned home for hospice care because they couldn’t treat her lymphoma due to COVID or the COVID due to cancer. It was a sad moment, and I knew I had to make the most of the time we had left together.

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Prophet Song: A Novel

Read: January 2024

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Prophet Song: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

In 2024, I started my reading journey with the Booker Prize 2023 winner – Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. The book presents a chilling and astonishing outlook of a nation sliding into authoritarianism while also painting a profoundly humane portrait of a mother’s struggle to keep her family together. I have not set a goal of the number of books to read in 2024, but this is an excellent first-day pageturner.

It all begins on a dark, rainy evening in Dublin when Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, opens her front door to two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police. They are there to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart as the government is gradually turning towards tyranny. As her world crumbles and the people she loves disappear, Eilish faces the dystopian reality of her country. How far is Eilish willing to go to protect her family? And what, or who, is she ready to leave behind?


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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The Brighter the Light

Read: June 2022

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The Brighter the Light

by Mary Ellen Taylor

The Brighter the Light by Mary Ellen Taylor was my eighty-ninth book since the beginning of 2019. After reading about Thomas Cromwell, I needed a change of pace. With the start of the Hurricane season, it seemed as good a time as any to read a novel by a fellow Southerner. That the book is also an “evocative dual-timeline novel detailing one woman’s journey to discover the hidden stories of her family’s seaside resort” seemed a perfect match.

I highly recommend this book. As a Southerner, I found the revealing of the hidden secrets accomplished in a style that makes this a page-turner.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

When a shipwreck surfaces, old secrets are sure to follow.

Or so goes the lore in Ivy Neale’s hometown of Nags Head, North Carolina. When Ivy inherits her family’s beachfront cottage upon her grandmother’s death, she knows returning to Nags Head means facing the best friend and the boyfriend who betrayed her years ago.

But then a winter gale uncovers the shipwreck of local legend—and Ivy soon begins to stumble across more skeletons in the closet than just her own. Amid the cottage’s clutter are clues from her grandmother’s past at the enchanting seaside resort her family once owned. One fateful summer in 1950, the arrival of a dazzling singer shook the staff and guests alike—and not everyone made it to fall.

As Ivy contends with broken relationships and a burgeoning romance in the present, the past threatens to sweep her away. But as she uncovers the strength of her grandmother and the women who came before her, she realizes she is like the legendary shipwreck: the sands may shift around her, but she has found her home here by the sea.


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Beautyland: A Novel

Read: June 2024

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Beautyland: A Novel

by Marie-Helene Bertino

I started reading “Beautyland: A Novel” by Marie-Helene Bertino today. The novel is about the fragility and resilience of life on Earth and in our universe. It tells the story of a baby born with extraordinary perception to a single mother in Philadelphia when Voyager 1 embarks on its interstellar journey. As we follow Adina Giorno’s growth, we witness her awakening to her exceptional nature—a profound understanding of a distant planet.

With the introduction of a fax machine, she established a unique form of communication with her extraterrestrial kin, who dispatched her to observe and document the peculiarities of Earthlings. As Adina navigates the complexities of the human world, she not only shares her observations on the joys and terrors of existence but also grapples with her identity and the connections she forms. At a pivotal moment, a trusted friend encourages her to share her transmissions with the world, leading her to question if she is alone in her experiences.

Beautyland‘ is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn’t feel at home on Earth, penned by the highly acclaimed Marie-Helene Bertino, the author of ‘Parakeet.’ With her proven ability to craft compelling narratives, Bertino’s ‘Beautyland’ is a surefire way to captivate readers interested in contemporary fiction, themes of identity, and human connection.

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Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

Read: March 2023

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Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

by Margaret Atwood

Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood is a collection of remarkable tales, which delight, illuminate, and are quietly devastating. I especially found the stories about Nell and Tig compelling and engaging. Widow describes a letter Nell almost wrote to a friend after Tig is gone. Nell sounded like me when she said, “the warping or folding of time. In some parts of this refolded time, Tig still exists, as much as he ever did.”

The letter Nell is writing to a friend she will never be sent because it speaks to the harsh reality that grief imposes upon us.

Margaret Atwood writes as Nell,

Have I gone into the dark tunnel, dressed in mourning black with gloves and a veil, and come out the other end, all cheery and wearing bright colors and loaded for bear?

No. Because it’s not a tunnel. There isn’t any other end. Time has ceased to be linear, with life events and memories in a chronological row, like beads on a string. It’s the strangest feeling, or experience, or rearrangement. I’m not sure I can explain it to you.

As much as it might have appeared that I was in a dark tunnel after Jan died, I was not and am not now. There is indeed no defined end to the grief journey.

We all must learn how to live without our loved ones. The pathway I have chosen may not work for anyone else.

The earlier Nell and Tig stories are memories about their lives, reminding me of how I wrote about how Jan and I met and eventually married.

I have always enjoyed reading Atwood‘s writing, including The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. I highly recommend Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood!

Old Babes in the Wood was my twenty-third book of the year and fulfilled my Goodreads 2023 Reading Challenge, but it will not end my reading this year. 

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the world’s most visionary and canonical authors. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories–some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine–explores the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit, and intellect.

The two brave sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the unbelievable, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love–and what comes after.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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The Worst Hard Time

Read: September 2019

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The Worst Hard Time

by Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan was initially a book I selected from the e-library because nothing else I wanted to read was available. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down.

Now that we have had the warmest summer since 1936 during the dust bowl, the book has even more meaning.

According to The New York Times,

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect.”

With the likelihood of more ecological catastrophes in the immediate future, this is a book I highly recommend.

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Bright Young Women: A Novel

Read: October 2023

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Bright Young Women: A Novel

by Jessica Knoll

Today, I commenced reading Bright Young Women: A Novel by Jessica Knoll. Violent acts of the same man bring together two women from opposite sides of the country and become allies and sisters in arms as they pursue the justice that would otherwise elude them in one of the year’s most acclaimed, highly anticipated thrillers.

Masterfully blending psychological suspense and actual crime elements, Jessica Knoll—author of the bestselling novel Luckiest Girl Alive and the writer behind the Netflix adaption starring Mila Kunis—delivers a new and exhilarating thriller in Bright Young Women. The book opens on a Saturday night in 1978, hours before a soon-to-be-infamous murderer descends upon a Florida sorority house with deadly results.

The lives of those who survive, including sorority president and critical witness Pamela Schumacher, are forever changed. Across the country, Tina Cannon is convinced the man papers targeted her missing friend referred to as the All-American Sex Killer—and that he’s struck again. Determined to find justice, the two join forces as their search for answers leads to a final, shocking confrontation.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.



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