A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

But here was a way to evaluate existence. Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.

There is nothing like seeing a place for the last time to erase its imperfections.

Doing limited the dangers of thinking.

What was there to say? Trapped inside a person, grief can feel like a rising tide of water, something vast and dramatic requiring release. But once spoken, it tends to reveal itself to be the same, small essential things, over and over. He missed her. He struggled without her. He wished she were still there.

And then what? After the wedding, after the honeymoon–well, then it’s just days. Ordinary days. The insurmountable, self-renewing chores. The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals. And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong.

I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life. For me to write about Maralyn’s life is the most reliable way I can keep faith with this receding notion.

It is possible to write yourself out of loneliness. Possible, too, to write yourself into being. As her body shrank, Maralyn built herself out of words, sentence by sentence. When she noted the happenings of the day, however bleak, the day was proven to be real and her faculties intact. The writing was the proof. The lists, the menus, and the clothes were reminders that such things still existed. Solid things, on solid ground, that she could make with her own hands. She was still alive. Look, it said so on the page.

It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.

It was rare for him, this kind of clarity. But here was a way to evaluate existence. Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved. On that count, his life had been a triumph.

It is an irresistible thought, that we might be someone different somewhere else.

Signs tend to reveal themselves only in retrospect.

Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must know, we do know, that we’ll all have our time adrift. For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?

when they can’t imagine sharing their life with someone else.

For years he had been alone in the stubborn sort of way that lodges in people

self-reliance and proved our emotional self-sufficiency.” As if it were an achievement, to need no one else.

Maurice would tease Bob, which Bob hated, but it was only the natural order of things, the way families pass down pain like an inheritance.

It’s thought that there are around three million shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea

Things always need to be done. All vessels, all homes, however small and insubstantial, require a system.

They watched it shrink back into the haze. Maurice gave up and sat back down in the dinghy. Maralyn kept waving her jacket.

For what else is a marriage

Two people have to choose and be chosen, and, most unlikely of all, these choices must happen at roughly the same time.

Only the tenacity of my wife kept me alive,” he told the reporters. His impression of their roles had solidified into fact. He had given up; she had kept them going.

We talk about the dead to keep them alive. The conversation tends to work better with people who knew them too. To anyone else the dead are fictitious. A name

overwhelming in its variety and demands. Too many people

pamphlet for fixing the raft. It was laughable. They were supposed to dry