A retired University of Iowa English professor, Klaus (Taking Retirement
) offers a dreary, languid account of emotional management during the year of grief following his wife's sudden death. In touching letters to Kate, 60, his wife of 35 years who died of a massive hemorrhage upon returning one November day to her Iowa City home after an art fair, the author reveals his small, diurnal acts of evoking and preserving her memory. After the initial shock of Kate's death (she was 10 years his junior and a cancer survivor), Klaus describes being haunted by her effects: her clothes, her abandoned garden, her missing will. With his children grown, he is left to face Christmas largely alone, reviving Kate's memory to whoever will listen. He finds he drinks too much and overeats as compensation for her absence at dinner parties, then is rebuked eerily by her in his dreams ("How can you let yourself get like that, when I'm doing everything I can to keep you alive?" she chides him). Klaus's diary culminates in the triumphant May memorial service he plans, and his eventual execution of their long-postponed trip to Hawaii in order to spread Kate's ashes there. And despite his feelings of betrayal, the author does find companionship again. (Mar.)
