Everything Changes Everything Love Loss And A Really Long Walk – Lauren Kessler

We did what it took to make a place go, to make a marriage go. We were better, sometimes, with the former than with the latter. When a garden needs weeding, you see it, you know it. You do it. You get down on your hands and knees and dig out those offenders by the roots.

When the soil is depleted, it tells you, and you work in more compost, manure, bonemeal, lime. Fruit trees need pruning every year. You don’t question this. You do it. Or rather, Tom did it. If you don’t whack back the blackberries, they take over, so you whack. And you keep whacking.

But a long marriage is different. Or for us it was. A long marriage takes itself for granted. There is a line—I know there is, and I know we crossed it—between being at ease with someone, knowing that someone is there, counting on them—and taking them for granted, failing to see the specialness of what you have, failing to do the work to keep the specialness of what you had. A long marriage between two people who don’t do things to hurt each other, who settle into what is often enough comfort, who learn to accommodate or keep their own counsel—that kind of marriage doesn’t tell you what it needs.

It just keeps on keeping on. And then you learn too late that what you ignored, or buried and then were too scared to excavate, what you refused to admit, what you learned to live with because really, everything was okay, wasn’t it?—all that surfaces as regret. Or, to be honest, as anger. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Can that be right?

It seems both too great a number—do half of couples who pledge “’til death do us part” part before death?—and too little. I know almost no one who has not been divorced. That was never going to happen with our marriage, and it did not. Marriages end because of infidelity or financial difficulties, substance abuse, domestic violence, or that vague and all-encompassing “irreconcilable differences.”

Copyright © 2026 by Lauren Kessler Cover design by Terri Sirma. Cover images: photo © Getty Images, pattern © Shutterstock Cover copyright © 2026 by Hachette Book Group, Inc. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

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Print book interior design by Marie Mundaca. Library of Congress Control Number: 2025025501 ISBNs: 978-0-306-83575-9 (hardcover), 978-0-306-83577-3 (ebook) E3-20260116-JV-NF-ORI OceanofPDF.com Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Author’s Note Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Epilogue Acknowledgments Discover More Also by Lauren Kessler OceanofPDF.com For Tom, here, there, everywhere and for Lizzie, may you find your way home OceanofPDF.com Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more. OceanofPDF.com No hay camino, se hace camino al andar. There is no road, you make your own path as you walk. —Antonio Machado The idea is not to paper over your loss… the idea is smaller than that, yet also grander: that after all the grief and loss and disruption you are still—you always will be—exactly who you are.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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