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DEDICATION

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Tina Su Cooper, a U.S. woman whose husband, my editor Douglas Winslow Cooper, in his article entitled “Like a Plaintive Melody” wrote [in 2014] the following words expressing his profound grief though full of love to Tina Su Cooper, his wife:


Most mornings I sing to my beloved wife, as she lies immobile in the hospital bed we have at our home:

You were meant for me. I was meant for you.
Nature patterned you and when she was done,
You were all the sweet things rolled up in one.
You’re like a plaintive melody
That never lets me free,
For I’m content the angels must have sent you
And they meant you just for me.
******************
*“You Were Meant for Me (Broadway Melody of 1940)” by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed; lyrics © EMI Music Publishing Co.
******************

This song captures the bitter-sweet nature of our current situation, happy to be together, sometimes sad that Tina’s ill-health has limited her so greatly. She has been quadriplegic and ventilator-dependent, fed and medicated through a gastric tube, for the past ten years, and she will be so for as long as she lives.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fortune Emerence Chinemerem Nwaiwu is a fertile writer of both literary and religious texts, a professional tutor of Literature-in-English and a clergyman born to the family of Rev. Sampson Nwaiwu in Umuezu Egbeke Etche Rivers State of Nigeria. He earned his Master of Arts (MA) in Applied English Linguistics from University of Calabar, Cross River State and was also educated at Rivers State College of Education, Port-Harcourt, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in English Education. His works include: The Weeping Voice: A Basket of Injustice, The Whispering Hope: A Liturgic Compendium of Sermons on Pulpit, The Devil in the Cathedral, Echoes of Widows, Widows in the Web of Grief, and Tragic Errors of the Christians. The author has passion for reading and teaching. He is zealous in all his writing endeavors to speak for the masses, the downtrodden who are marooned in frustration and grief, uplifting their hopes to get out of the condition in which fate has trapped them. The auth...