Amy Krouse Rosenthal: ‘You May Want to Marry My Husband Jason’ Writer Dies At 51
The essay titled “You May Want to Marry My Husband” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal published by the New York Times on March 3, came with a title that sent plenty of people clicking. Now that same essay has come with an editor’s note that has updated readers with the news that Amy has died, 10 days after the essay was published.
“Editor’s note: Amy Krouse Rosenthal passed away on March 13, 2017. You can read her obituary here.”
Amy’s “You May Want to Marry My Husband” essay opened with words that described how Rosenthal had been attempting to write the piece for some time, but after going about five weeks with no “real food” and suffering with pain tended to by morphine, Amy had a lack of energy. Krouse Rosenthal wrote that falling asleep mid-sentence wasn’t conducive to writing.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Children’s Author & Filmmaker, Dies at 51, via @nytimes Brilliant mind & larger-than-life wit https://t.co/gHz6ir4Y6o
— yaser mowafi (@YaserMowafi) March 14, 2017
Amy wrote that she had to press on and publish her essay, since her pressing deadline wasn’t merely an editor’s wish, but the fact that she needed to write her essay whilst she still had a pulse.
“I have been married to the most extraordinary man for 26 years. I was planning on at least another 26 together. Want to hear a sick joke? A husband and wife walk into the emergency room in the late evening on Sept. 5, 2015. A few hours and tests later, the doctor clarifies that the unusual pain the wife is feeling on her right side isn’t the no-biggie appendicitis they suspected but rather ovarian cancer. As the couple head home in the early morning of Sept. 6, somehow through the foggy shock of it all, they make the connection that today, the day they learned what had been festering, is also the day they would have officially kicked off their empty-nestering. The youngest of their three children had just left for college.”
In an instant, the plans that Krouse Rosenthal had with her husband went up in the air. Thoughts of traveling to South Africa were no more. She noted how similarly the words “cancer” and “cancel” were, since so many plans — such as enjoying a writers’ residence — were cancelled with the cancer diagnosis. Amy discovered she had ovarian cancer in September, 2015, reports the New York Times, and died in her Chicago home on Monday.
That’s when Amy introduced readers to her husband, Jason Brian Rosenthal, a man that she claimed was easy to fall in love with, taking readers back to the day that she fell in love with him in 1989. Amy and Jason were only 24 years of age at the time. By 2017, Krouse Rosenthal described her husband Jason as a 5-foot, 10-inch, 160-pound man with salt-and-pepper hair and hazel eyes.
Jason is a sharp dresser who keeps in shape and is very handy. On top of those loving descriptions, Amy pegged Jason as a great cook who loves live music and is a captivating character whom her editor always wanted to read more about. And as Amy’s essay went viral, with the New York Times reporting approximately 4.5 million readers having soaked up Krouse Rosenthal’s article, people want to know even more about Jason, whom Amy deemed “an absolutely wonderful father.”
For his part, Jason Rosenthal said he didn’t know what Amy was writing, according to the below tweet from the Chicago Sun Times, but knew his wife was writing something important before her death. Upon reading Krouse Rosenthal’s viral essay, Jason was beyond touched.
“I didn't know exactly what she was composing,” says Jason Rosenthal https://t.co/22nAOvlgq6 via @suntimesobits
— Chris Fusco (@FuscoChris) March 10, 2017
Amy wrote about how much her “incredibly handsome” Jason loved to travel, and his love for tiny things. With Amy’s touching tribute to the man who arrived at their first pregnancy ultrasound with flowers, readers were very moved by the heartfelt essay, especially when Krouse Rosenthal wrote about wanting more time with her husband.
With more than 1,500 comments beneath her original essay, Amy touched hearts by leaving an intentional space at the end for Jason and his new future love to write their own love story. However, Jason wrote that his love story with Amy belonged there.
[Featured Image by Dragon Images/Shutterstock]
