“Most people don’t know there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t get too comfortable & fall asleep & miss your life. ” ― Brian Andreas

The Gift of Goodbye: A Story about Agape Love is a memoir about my journey through some tough years of my life where angels were very busy making sure I did not fall asleep and miss my life. Outwardly, I was feeling comfortable in my life with a 4 year old son, a 2 year old daughter, and a husband, living in Boulder, Colorado. We were living the dream, or so we thought, of having the perfect family, a lovely home and a second home in the mountains, good health, resources to fund our desires, and good friends. I had gone back to school to feed the lifelong learner part of me. The summer in between my first and second year of school, I started to feel that something was off between my husband and I. Something that was likely there before I acknowledged it as I was a people pleaser, always focusing on keeping the peace in the family and going along with life, not really connecting with whether it agreed with me or not. I approached my husband with these feelings and he reluctantly agreed to go to marriage counseling. Half way through my second year of school, we were not making progress reconciling our differences and the wedge between us grew deeper. And here I was, facing a divorce. I captured my thoughts and feelings in a journal to help me process these emotions, of failure, of shame, of not feeling worthy. Our divorce timeline followed some interesting coinciding days- filed for separation on April Fool’s Day, completed mediation on Halloween, and our divorce was final on Pearl Harbor Day. As I started this divorce process, little did I know that something more gut wrenching than a divorce would be building in a parallel universe of my life.