Tolstoy, reworked: all happy endings are alike; every unhappy ending
is unhappy in its own way. “And they lived happily ever after”
doesn’t ask for details the way “it was going so well, until…” does.
And so unhappy songs seem to hold my interest better than happy ones;
and so this is an unhappy love letter from widower to his wife, a
quiet list of memories, a view into the mixed longing and complaint of
a too-short, badly ended life together.

As a writer my reach often exceeds my grasp, and so I fall back on
songwriting, where the shortness of the form keeps me honest but lets
me at least hint at with vignette what I have trouble laying out