WE FRET A LOT ABOUT THE EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE WE BRING to relationships, as if the goal is to come to each new love empty-handed, our hearts wiped clean. But recently, when I read that the widows of two best-selling memoirists had fallen in love, I was reminded that leaving your bags behind isn’t really an option. And you shouldn’t want it to be.
The pair: Lucy Kalanithi, wife of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon whose 2016 memoir When Breath Becomes Air, about his terminal lung-cancer diagnosis, came out the year after his death. And John Duberstein, husband of Nina Riggs, whose book The Bright Hour came out in June, a few months after Riggs died of complications from metastatic breast cancer.
John and Lucy’s story, first reported by the Washington Post,…
