Dear Friend,
Let me tell you something about grief that might surprise you—sometimes it makes you laugh when you least expect it.
After losing Ellen, my wife and best friend of 47 years, I discovered that the journey through loss isn’t just a somber march through sadness. It’s a wildly unpredictable road with moments that will have you crying one minute and laughing out loud the next—much like our marriage itself.
This memoir isn’t what you might expect. Yes, it explores the crater that loss leaves in your life when someone you’ve loved for nearly five decades is suddenly gone. But it’s also filled with the kind of stories I’d share if we were sipping coffee while reminiscing about the woman who could make me fall in love with her all over again every time she’d flash her perfect smile.
You’ll read about the time Ellen and I tried to figure out why I’d jump when we were preparing meals together. If she turned toward me with a knife in hand, I reacted as if she was ready to slice me up. A believer in reincarnation, Ellen said she must have put me down in a past marriage for something I’d said or done! I also share many other funny everyday moments that seemed ordinary then but reveal themselves now as the true treasures they were.
For five years, I’ve been writing this book, often with a cup of coffee gone cold beside me as I lost myself in memories. The writing has been therapy, my way of making sense of an Ellen-less world I never planned to inhabit alone.
A Unique Collaborative Approach
What makes this memoir particularly unique is its collaborative nature. Working with Claude, an AI assistant, I’ve created something that goes beyond traditional memoir boundaries. Claude contributed approximately 15% of the manuscript, crafting letters, journal entries, poems, and two essays on grief that complement and enhance my personal narrative.
Together, we’ve woven a tapestry of voices that explore grief from multiple perspectives. You’ll find letters and journal entries penned in the distinctive styles of famous authors like Hemingway, Twain, and Henry James as well as the unmistakable voices of characters like Hannibal Lecter. The philosophical dimensions of loss are explored through writings in the style of Henri Bergson, Carl Jung, Baruch Spinoza, and even Albert Einstein.
The poetic section channels the spirits of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, and Plath, offering different lenses through which to view profound loss. Even the wisdom of spiritual thinkers like Soto Zen Buddhist Dōgen Zenji and Native American shaman Black Elk finds its way into these pages.
This collaborative approach with AI allowed me to step outside my own grief occasionally, to see it reflected and refracted through different minds and sensibilities. The result is a memoir that honors not just my journey and Ellen’s memory, but the universal human experience of loving and losing that writers and thinkers have grappled with throughout history.
An Invitation
I’m not a grief expert or a self-help guru. I’m just a paperback writer who loved deeply, lost profoundly, and somehow found my way to a new normal—with wrong turns, awkward moments, and unexpected discoveries along the way.
If you’ve ever loved someone, lost someone, or simply want to understand what that journey looks like from the inside—this memoir might be for you. I’ve written it as if I’m telling these stories directly to a dear friend.
I hope you’ll take this journey with me. I promise it won’t all be sad—Ellen would have hated that.
Hugs,
Chet Day
P.S. Ellen is currently available only as an ebook. Every purchase supports independent writing and ensures that stories like this—the real, messy, funny, heartbreaking human ones—find their way into the world. Click here to order now.
