By Montague Gammon III
The recently released memoir, “Bitter Wine, Sweet Melons,” very appropriately subtitled “Suffering Loss & Savoring Life,” by my VEER, and formerly “Hampton Roads Magazine,” co-worker Betsy DiJulio, is a series of “largely chronological” essays related to the deaths of her husband of almost a quarter century, the surviving member of two dogs the childless couple owned, and her mother, all in the span of two months and two days.
The emphasis is understandably on the aftermath of Joe DiJulio’s death, the man she terms in her untitled Foreword her “essential counterweight.” Yet when she also mentions that she has “written about [her] mother elsewhere,” I feel a pang of curiosity and regret because losing a parent a short time after the loss of a spouse must surely compound, or at least influence, all the myriad emotions that follow.
The very publication of this 144 page book (including Preface and an untitled Foreword) is a testament to Betsy’s fortitude, and to the remarkable and remarkably wide and large circle of supportive friends she had earned in Hampton Roads and elsewhere before those events of July 30 to October 2, 2015.
Close friends’ emotional support and the repeated reminders and reinforcement of her late husband’s professional and personal worth to many people in many ways, and the true love, and eventual second husband, she found in Bob Friesen some time later, are really the overarching themes the memoir chronicles.
It’s easy to see why Joe DiJulio was professionally well regarded in life and honored in death and personally affectionately liked in life and missed in death.
She leaves out something important about Bob, which she had mentioned in social media comments about their outdoor wedding on the Outer Banks, about 5 ½ years after Joe’s death. An album of photos about her life was compiled as part of the ceremony’s backdrops. Her fiancé insisted that photos of Joe and of her and Joe together be included, because her previous husband was such an important part of her lifetime journey. That, folks, is a truly loving, true gentleman.
The book is never a tear-jerker, at least not for more casual friends such as this writer, though there are second hand accounts of closer acquaintances tearing up or crying outright when reading it.
It’s not self-help either. It’s too precise and too sharply perceptive for that.
Nor is it without humor. Betsy’s take on the commercialization of the yoga she devoutly practices is delightfully scathing and funny, and her dismissal of relatives who tried to horn in on post-mortem finances for their own profit, though not humorous, is a masterpiece of tact and, for those who must recognize themselves, deadly accuracy.
Betsy is not only a writer of vegan food columns and vegan restaurant reviews, of a vegan blog and a cookbook, but an art teacher, art critic and accomplished artist herself. I understand why her artworks that are linked to each chapter must appear only in black, white and gray, but that is a sad loss to the economics of publishing, as her cover art, in color, proves.
The book is erudite without a hint of pretension, and in its procession from the particulars of events to worthy generalities it is filled with compassionate but never, ever, self-pitying descriptions of what happens when one loses someone of crucial importance in ones life, observations that are often thought but rarely so well expressed.
(This writer’s parents died six months apart, six months to the day, when I was 30. Mother first aged 57, then father a month after he turned 76, both victims of tobacco, Powhatan’s Revenge.)
It’s a short book and a quick read, but worthy of re-readings for what might have been easily missed the first time around.
It’s available on Amazon, and one hopes soon to be found in local book stores.
