This email came today.
It's a reminder of this Saturday's concert in Raleigh at the Meymandi Concert Hall.
Featured will be Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. This was the concert my daughters and I attended after Becky's death 13 years ago. No bond between human beings is closer than marriage. Marriage is without parallel or precedent. But such extraordinary closeness comes at a cost. No man who has ever been married has escaped the shock of the enormity of the price that is paid for this thing called intimacy. A good marriage is the closest thing on earth to the realization of the coexistence between people. And when that is lost due to the death of one of the partners, there is no deeper grief. This piece by Mussorgsky brought me relief at a time in my life when I desperately needed it. Marriage is a marvelous thing. Only death can sever it, as only love can confer it. For 37 years God granted me the gift of marriage. For 13 subsequent years he has granted me the gift of widowerhood. I will attend this concert and celebrate the memory of those wonderful years of marriage when I could hold my wife's head in my lap and move my hands over her warm skin. Death can never erase those memories, nor can life.