“We didn’t grow old together. We stayed young together.”
Who’s to say — was Marc Gellman ’s fairytale love affair with Barbara really that extraordinary? They were together for 46 years until she died of cancer just short of her 60th birthday. He was from Brooklyn, she from the Bronx. They met at a young age. Had three children. Good careers. Good friends, fun times, amusing tales. If you could measure love on a scale, theirs would tip it.
But it is the very ordinary about their life and their relationship that makes “Seven Days of SHIVA” such a poignant and powerful memoir. In Marc, one finds your stereotypical Jewish New York everyman, charting a life course that many of us follow and others aspire to.
This is not a swashbuckling adventure, not a rags-to-riches, no stunning whodunnit, but a sweet and simple love sonnet (albeit a lot longer) to the other pea in Marc’s pod, a deep love readers can feel and embrace in every word.
If you see something in yourselves in the characters and the story, don’t be surprised. Marc and Barbara go through life’s routine experiences and defining moments, and as they do, you’ll relate to their dilemmas and decisions, or imagine from within your own world how you’d feel and act in such situations.
Remember that feeling of falling in love? Marc does: “It was like everything Barbara and I did was right. There were no regrets, no looking back. It was like everything around us was coming together so easily. We were in unison and knew what the other was thinking and didn’t have to speak. It was like all we could think about was each other.”
The author, with candor, love, devotion, warmth, humor, joy and pain, uses the seven days of Shiva — the formal mourning period for the dead…