“Your husband has to be rushed to OR. He needs to have a chest tube put in to drain pleural fluid. Every one we’ve seen like this is malignant. Don’t you have family in New Jersey? We think you’d better go back there.”

Thus begins the first step of the wanderings—from diagnosis, through death, and followed by the first two years of widowhood. Grief is multiplied. Within several weeks, her family of eight—daughters, sons-in- law, grandchildren, and beloved twelve-year-old cat—had shrunk to two.

Based on daily journal entries, this...