Search - Eternal on the Water

While reading Joseph Monninger’s “Eternal on the Water,” I felt my heart rearranging, reconstructing and taking on a more pure shape than it ever knew before. The how’s and why’s and when’s of love are best described as a mystery in most people’s lives. One could say everything about love is unknown, unplanned and uncertain until forces in place, timed to perfection, bring one’s path to another’s path and forever alter their lives in ways unimaginable. Somehow love, in its most pure form, is brought to life in Monninger’s story about a man and woman who fall in love but tragically are aware of their love having a time limit. What would you do? How would you want to live knowing you or the one you love will decline quickly through an incurable disease? These questions are answered in the most beautiful and provocative manner as the reader is treated to being there from the moment Cobb and Mary’s soul-mate-kind-of-love blooms to the very end when the couple elevates their love to the highest form of love known – sacrifice. In between their first and final meeting you’ll be intrigued and romanced with mythology, legends, stories, poetry and global travels all related to beauty in earth, water, nature, animals, landscape, friendships and family. But mostly, you’ll view love with a renewed and pure heart that will surely remain with you long after you’ve finished the book.

Life is a journey and we all know the destination. We just don't often know the time of departure, except when an incurable disease is involved. That's the ultimate point of this book, a moving, powerful story of love between two travelers who meet -- by chance? Maybe. by fate? Maybe. by heart? Definitely -- enroute to a kayak trip down a fabled New England river. Their story laces a love of nature, of education, of science, of people, of animals, of birds, around the love created by two hearts joined as one in a way only true love can. And how they face the dark reality that soon they must love each other enough to let go. For "love is," as the songwriter Ben Gibbard said, "watching someone die." This is a moving story of love and its power in life and up to and over death. Read it with someone you love. Share it with someone you love. You will be all the better for it.

Ugh, this was terrible. Or, at least the first 106 pages were horrible (that's where I stopped reading). On the bright side, I got this one in the $1 bin at Borders, so not such a big loss money-wise.