"I spent the first half of my life searching although, had you asked, I couldn't have told you for what I was searching. Perhaps it was for love, for an end to loneliness, for someone to listen, perhaps for answers to my questions about the meaning of it all. Sometimes that search seemed futile but I was always aware of an elusive something, just out of my grasp, something that every once in a while revealed itself momentarily and kept me searching."

Author Elizabeth Russell's dramatic story speaks of the isolation and longing deep within us that is tempered by an appreciation of the...