Gone to Sorrow Paperback – December 3, 2017
by Ms. Susan Crouch (Author)

I was paralyzed from the neck down at the age of five, still my life was filled with promise and desire. I earned a master's degree from Columbia University without ever leaving my room and began a sixteen-year career as an editor for Macmillan, Bantam, and later Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Dreams of romance even I was afraid to dream came true--then Roger returned one winter's day and the past came to life with whispered dread.

The story reveals who I am, unveiling a world that is often left hidden, clouded in stereotype, in women's literature, but it is not my story. It is the tale of a strange young man I never saw and spoke to only once, in one chilling, four-hour-long telephone conversation weeks after his first letter, days after his brother died suddenly, mysteriously, in his sleep. Roger and I found each other on the computer, long before the invention of chat rooms or websites. He drew me close with an enthusiasm and intensity I had never known, then overwhelmed by his loss, he disappeared.

For almost two decades he was but a memory, until I conjured him up on the Internet: Google search and ye shall find. I summoned him back to say hello, to reminisce, to laugh, to touch once more the boy I could never forget. Eighteen years had gone by without a word when Roger returned—one day after my brother died suddenly, mysteriously, in his sleep. Although some might see this work as inspirational and others as cathartic, my book is above all else a love story, dedicated to my family, my brother, and to one man from long ago who I have never met.

Gone to Sorrow depicts life at its most tenuous and love at its most beautiful and most fragile moments, moving toward a place where reality ceases to exist and destiny reigns. In my grief I drifted through time, toward the past, far away from a life I never meant to leave. There I was safe. There I could breathe. I read notes I had stored away in a small red tin for almost twenty years containing the emails a very young Roger had sent me. There I found the name Jackson Browne, a singer he loved, the man he wanted to be . . . a musician who foretold in song our decades' old mystery. My sorrow turned to purpose: we must meet, the three of us together, to understand what Roger called "our cosmic connection"—and we do meet, on a night shadowed in memory and shrouded in ghosts.

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