Starting with the sudden death of his wife in his arms in just ten minutes on a day when she had had no symptoms of sickness after outpatient surgery on her knee the day before, possibly due to sudden mixed drug side effects, artist Jonathan Sandlofer described how he slowly emerged from his own emotional shutting down to find a way forward in writing his daily experience in a notebook, and how he applied his experience of writing five or six successful crime novels after an earlier career in painting to shape these notes into a book, A Widower's Notebook, which he never intended to publish but which his new agent took over and which even before publication became the talk of the town and led to a "beauty show" of bidding by five publishers, won by Penguin, whoi launched a genuine best seller last year which is now his chief claim to fame, since it has met with a tidal wave of acceptance which still yields some ten emails a day from people who are moved and helped by the work, which shows that Sandlofer is an exceptionally fine painter in words of the concrete and live detail of felt experience, moment by moment, possessed with a consummate story telling ability, with which he proved the therapist Carl Rogers' principle that “what is most personal is most universal.” A remarkable facet of the book are the drawings he made copying photographs of his wife, himself, his daughter, and his cat, which he said allowed him "to make something from my sadness, for a drawing has life because you put your hand to it", including some of his cat which he acquired in Yaddo Art Colony and which hated him at first for two days "but then we fell in love". He said he had given as many as 80 talks on his book and his advice to anyone who suffered a loss was to "do anything - garden, cook. I had writing and drawing. The thing I discovered about writing is that you remember so much when you are writing about the past. Drawing from photographs allowed me to live in those moments, such as when we first met in art school, after which we broke up but than married for forty years,"quite successfully "though I don't believe there is any marriage which doesn't include the word 'divorce'!"