7. 1 Introduction
This is going to be the hardest part of my memoirs to write about. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ll manage to finish it, but I’ve decided that I need to try. Looking back, I’ve written about some of the significant people in my life – Bernie and Jonah have each had their own sections and Lucy has cropped up in a few places – but I haven’t done justice to the person who meant – and still means – the most to me. If you’ve read anything about me at all, you’ll know that I’m talking about Angie. She dropped into my life from nowhere as a witness – and at first a potential suspect – in a murder investigation[1] and ended up becoming my wife.
You’ve probably also heard how our marriage ended twenty-five years later when she was knifed to death on our own kitchen[2]. That, of course, was how I came to be available to marry Bernie and become Lucy’s stepfather. In between, there were a lot of years of happy married life, which isn’t, I suppose, very exciting to write about. However, I feel obliged to have a go at describing the love of my life. I don’t want you to go away thinking that she was an insignificant part of my life – or insignificant compared with Our Bernie, at any rate! And I’m also aware that people sometimes think that I take Bernie for granted and don’t seem to appreciate her properly, because I don’t pretend to love her the way I loved Angie – and still do.
So here goes! Don’t expect a well-crafted story. The beginning and the end you already know, so I’ll try to be brief about those, and the middle is going to be a bit of a mish-mash of memories that probably won’t mean a lot to anyone except me. I hope it will give you a flavour of the woman that changed my life forever. Nothing I could write could ever give you more than a tiny hint of how wonderful she was or how much I miss her still, but I’ll do my best. Just remember that, whatever you think from reading this, she was twice as beautiful and ten times more intelligent and twenty times kinder than I make her sound.
[1] You can read about how I met Angie in DC Johns Meets his Match, which is available as an e-book in Amazon and Kobo stores. It also features in Jonah’s biographical work, Changing Scenes of Life.
[2] There are accounts of this from Bernie’s point of view in Despise not thy Mother and Changing Scenes of Life (where you can also read how we evemtually got to the bottom of who it was who had done it and why).