One Dark Mile: A Widower's Story

This is a poignant if over-emotive account of the last two years of a dying woman's life as told by her husband. When the author, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, married his second wife, he accepted the prognosis of her ovarian cancer. As the disease progressed, he recorded its harrowing trajectory in a journal. He tracks the diurnal imperatives of his wife's colostomy, and notes ``what it is like to marry and care for a cancer patient in the United States today.'' In addition to the backbreaking routines required in nursing Joan, who died in 1975 at age 43, Robinson dealt with a complex of emotions--love, sexual frustration, disgust--which he describes candidly in this graphic depiction of living with a terminal cancer patient. (Dec.)