They were Ohio State college sweethearts, together for more than forty-two years, and enjoying their life and love story. It was what they always dreamed of. Everything was wonderful. Until it wasn’t.
When Judy faints while taking a shower, doctors utter ten words that change everything: “You have a large mass in your right temporal lobe.” As the days following this heartbreaking discovery unfold, Judy and her husband Roy are launched into a devastating new trajectory. A new chapter of their epic love story begins.
It All Belongs: Love, Loss, and Learning to Live Again offers a tender chronicle of the days, weeks, and months after Judy’s glioblastoma diagnosis. In the book’s first section, “How to Live,” we meet Judy in full bloom as a spiritual director, expressive artist, and leader of retreats designed to help others awaken to their inner whispers.
Readers witness firsthand the playful dynamics, deep connection, and inner workings of Judy and Roy’s love-filled relationship—and how they care for, support, and encourage each other’s dreams. From their mundane, day-to-day exchanges to the overarching decisions driving their biggest life experiences, readers gaze into a window and experience a deep and enduring love story that actively models “the real deal.”
The book’s second part, “How To Die”, begins with the jarring end to this idyllic life due to Judy’s unexpected terminal glioblastoma diagnosis. Drawing from the well of all she knows, has learned, and loves to share with others, Judy pours her thoughts, impressions, feelings, prayers, and insights into her daily journaling practice. She punctuates her written narrative with beautiful, original artwork. Her journey imbues her long-standing mandala spiritual practice with new meaning and significance. Readers travel with Judy through her pain, frustration, hopes, despair, and unfaltering faith, no matter what.
At her side, helpless to change or stop what they both know is inevitable, Roy’s story begins to unfold as he actively cares for Judy through radiation, chemotherapy, surgeries, immunotherapy, a stroke, rehabilitation, and then through their final days in hospice when every moment becomes a precious gift.
Along with Roy, readers find in these dark days a new depth to their love story. When at last both Roy and Judy know the time has come and she is ready, as he whispers to her “fly,” Judy departs this earthly plane to be with God—and Roy is left to grapple with unbearable heartbreak, crushing grief, and the unanswerable question of “what now?”
The third and final part of It All Belongs, picks up Roy’s narrative just ten days after Judy has died. Acting upon his impulse to journal explosive feelings that demand expression, Roy calls upon his years of observing Judy “walking her talk” and he writes, almost continuously, about what he feels and experiences as he somehow manages to put one foot before the other. From day-to-day tasks and errands to solo travels in search of meaning, relief from abysmal grief, and his will to, as he has promised Judy, “live, really live” the rest of his own days on Earth, Roy offers readers yet another rare window. This one shows him coping with grief’s rawness and sharp edges.
Through journal entries, poetry, and prayers, Roy pens in pubs, parks, restaurants, on a mountainside, in the Grand Canyon, and on the island of Iona, Scotland. He pours out his fears, anger, joy, ever-expanding love, and, finally, makes peace with the cruel hand that life has dealt him. As readers walk with Roy, they become part of these explorations of what it means to endure deep grief that comes on the heels of its twin: deep love.
It All Belongs invites readers to bear witness not only to unbearable pain, but also to the healing that arrives, slowly but surely, ushering us back to life, hope, and to a new understanding of eternal love’s true gifts. The journey of the epic love story chronicled in It All Belongs will widen your view of love and grief. It will allow you to embrace the words Judy used to greet life’s ups and downs: “It all belongs.”
