After reading Why Aren’t We Rich Yet? and picking out/starting/completing a couple of other short books, I went back to the stacks and found Willoughby’s other book (I bought both in May 2021, when this book was relatively new) by chance (it was right with Focus on the 5 which I started after I started this book but finished first).
So: Five years after Why Aren’t We Rich Yet?, Willoughby’s wife of almost fifty years dies after a long illness. He started a Facebook group called The Reluctant Bachelor where he could share things about how he was doing and almost a daily log (almost like a Web log) of what he was feeling and experiencing as the days passed. He cleaned it up and bookified it, and here we are.
To be honest, much of the content, especially early in the book, deals with practical things and logistics of living when the primary housekeeper is gone–things like how he needs to press his shirts and the challenges of keeping things clean. As the long-time primary majordomo of Nogglestead, I cannot relate to these particular concerns, but I can understand about how the little things can vex you during grief, and maybe you appreciate those little things now when you overlooked them or took them for granted.
The book covers some three or four years, with great gaps in the timeline. He does go into some memories of meeting and dating his beloved in high school–they married at 18 and 17–and he gets some strength from the community that forms around the Facebook group culminating, sort of, in a widows and widowers trip to Branson. I kind of expected a I finally found someone else coda to it, but although he speculates about the possibility, he does not end up with someone else by the end of the book.
It looks like these were the only two books he wrote (or has written so far). He’s a competent writer, although this book has a little thinness to it because it is a collection of short Facebook posts with maybe a little extra, but not much.
The most resonant part is a (short) chapter about caretaker’s guilt–that feeling that you did not do enough for someone you cared for at the end of life. He says that other people might tell you how much you did for your loved one, but you won’t see it. And I think that’s true. Except for me. When I was last in Wisconsin to visit my grandmother, now, what, 99? and in a long term care facility now, I spent most of the time talking with my uncle. And let’s not talk about how little I took care of my sainted mother. Others might feel guilty, but, ah, gentle reader, I am guilty. Even now with my family, not that anyone’s dying or anything, but I spend too little time with my boys, my beautiful wife, and my mother-in-law.
