A Chicago children’s author, who is terminally ill with ovarian cancer, penned a heartbreaking essay to her husband of nearly three decades and urges someone to “swipe right” on him.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, 51, described her battle with cancer and marriage to her husband, Jason, in a “Modern Love” column published Friday in the New York Times, which has quickly gone viral.
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In the tear-jerking essay, Rosenthal wrote that she’s been married to the “most extraordinary man for 26 years” and was “planning on at least another 26 together” before being diagnosed with cancer in 2015.
“Want to hear a sick joke? A husband and wife walk into the emergency room in the late evening on Sept. 5, 2015,” Ronsethanl writes. “A few hours and tests later, the doctor clarifies that the unusual pain the wife is feeling on her right side isn’t the no-biggie appendicitis they suspected but rather ovarian cancer.”
She adds that her cancer diagnosis came on the same day their daughter had just left for college, making them empty-nesters, and shattering their plans for the future together.
Despite going weeks without real food and feeling weak, she said she took it upon herself to create a “dating profile” for her husband, whom she says is “an easy man to fall in love with. I did it in one day.”
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“I have never been on Tinder, Bumble or eHarmony, but I’m going to create a general profile for Jason right here, based on my experience of coexisting in the same house with him for, like, 9,490 days,” she writes.
READ MORE: The story of a B.C. woman’s fight with ovarian cancer strikes a nerve and goes viral
Rosenthal, the author of roughly two dozen children’s picture books and a recent memoir, said she has been married to Jason Rosenthal — a lawyer, a painter, and an “excellent cook” — for 26 years.
“Here is the kind of man Jason is: He showed up at our first pregnancy ultrasound with flowers,” she writes. “This is a man who, because he is always up early, surprises me every Sunday morning by making some kind of oddball smiley face out of items near the coffeepot: a spoon, a mug, a banana.”
She closes the love note to her husband, which she wrote on Valentine’s Day, by saying her hope “is that the right person reads this, finds Jason, and another love story begins.”
“I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet.”
Dozens of readers took to social media to share their reactions to the heart-wrenching story.
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