Our wedding was as intimate and magical as we’d hoped. We held it at Amy’s parents’ home, which by definition guaranteed perfection, thanks to Ann’s gifted attention to detail and planning. The gathering of Krouses and Rosenthals permeated the house with an almost palpable aura of love and family. My best friend Dave was my best man. He and I shared a scotch, in one of the Krouse kids’ bedrooms that hadn’t been redecorated since high school, while we got dressed for the evening’s main event.
The ceremony went along beautifully and predictably until it was my turn to say my vows. No one was more surprised than I was when I suddenly burst into tears and began to weep like a baby. I’m still not sure exactly why.
Maybe I got hit by the colossal size of the commitment I was making at the ripe old age of twenty-six.
Maybe my tendency to bottle up my emotions and very rarely cry finally caught up with me.
Or, likeliest of all, maybe, standing there looking into my bride’s eyes, it hit me to my core that I was experiencing the most complete, most genuinely happy moment of my life.
Our honeymoon was perfect. We split the time between California and Colorado. In California we drove down Highway 1 along the Pacific coastline. We spent beautiful evenings at Ventana in Big Sur, a luxury hotel “where the sky, sea, mountains and redwoods all converge” (as they describe it on their website), and more beautiful evenings at the San Ysidro Ranch in the Santa Barbara foothills, overlooking the ocean. Colorado was a skiing excursion, during which I managed to dislocate my shoulder—again—but that did not alter my pure elation at the occasion or let it stop me, or us, for a second.
We were young, “deeply in love” is an understatement, and we were ecstatically excited about the infinite possibilities of the life we were starting together.
I got my first glimpse into living with a writer; when our conversation turned to thoughts about our future, we literally wrote out a list of our mutual marital commitments and gave it a title: “Amy and Jason Rosenthal’s Marriage Goals and Ideas.”
They were lofty intentions, but we lived by them—for the most part. We didn’t do too well on the “lunch together once a week” thing, for example, because, well, life. In general, though, that simple list became the model we followed in our marriage. It established the foundation for how we wanted to be as people and as a couple as we began to start a family.
It made sense that it was formalized into a written list, too. For one thing, Amy was the queen of list-making, which she elevated into an art form. The idea of lists in general became ingrained in our family life. Yes, Amy was a list maker in all facets of her life, but the skill drifted in to all of our lives as well. There were lists for the babysitter, lists for how to spend the afternoon, lists analyzing a decision (pros and cons), and lists for me when Amy went out of town on a business trip.
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Amy and Jason Rosenthal’s Marriage Goals and Ideas
Have lunch together at least once a week.
Keep sex fun.
Reading>TV.
Dinner time = time2B2gether. Music in the background is fine, TV is not.
Never stop learning! Take classes, read, cook and travel.
Get dressed up and go on dates.
Whenever we sign something “Amy & Jason,” we both sign our name.
Annual portraits—“unadorned face” Start July, 1991, 25 years later (July, 2016) publish book! Entitled “Metamorphosis.”
Record our kids’ voices every year.
To, at some point (hopefully soon), work together, have our own business. Life is too short and we love being together too much to spend 9–5 apart every day.
Keep our cupboards & fridge continually stocked with good, healthy food.
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For another thing, I’m not a neuropsychologist, but it’s common sense to me that writing something down makes it more likely that you’ll get it done, and that’s what happened with this list. That list of marriage goals wasn’t affixed to our nightstand or taped to the mirror in our bathroom—in fact I hadn’t seen it for years until I came across it after Amy’s death. But the muscle memory behind the emotions of the list had been powerful. We’d made it twenty-six years earlier, yet when I visited it again after so much time had passed, it felt so familiar. The specifics of this list we wrote on our honeymoon were recognizable for the way it guided our lives without staring us in the face. Without our realizing it, year after year it really did set the tone for addressing issues that came up during the course of our marriage. It set out our shared values when we were so young, and then those values manifested themselves without our trying to model them intentionally.
This thinking proved crucial early on in our marriage when we came to a crossroads, the biggest test we’d faced in our young lives together.
Amy was an established rock star in the advertising business by then. She was a copywriter, and she loved it. She’d come home with stories of what she and her colleagues did that day at work, and it sounded more like play to me. I’d never heard of a job like it. (My dad and stepdad were both in advertising but they never described their careers in this way!) She was a witty, smart, masterfully creative woman who thrived in the company of other witty, smart, masterfully creative people. She had a great reputation in the business, so it made perfect sense when one of the most sought-after firms in the country reached out to her with a job offer.
It was an incredible, well-deserved compliment, and an amazing opportunity. Amy was as giddy as a little girl, and I couldn’t have been happier for her. There was just one downside: The job would require us to move to Portland, Oregon. Two thousand miles from home. We had no family in Portland, and maybe one friend.
I was just beginning to establish myself as a Chicago lawyer. Though I was working at a small firm, I had dreamed of opening my own practice as a solo practitioner instead of joining a firm. The dream to hang out my own shingle came from my life as an entrepreneur. From an early age I’d held a job. This process began when I was eight years old and had my own paper route. From there, I worked steadily all through law school in different fields. Also, my role modeling for a career path up to this point came from my parents, who were both self-employed their entire adult lives. And all of my contacts were in my hometown. If I was going to build a business, the odds were in favor of my building it there.
At the same time, though, I was excited for Amy’s opportunity to soar in a career in which she was already a heavyweight and work on some of the most creative campaigns in the country.
So we took a trip to Portland. Amy interviewed with the ad agency, while I had a few informal chats with a couple of law firms and the legal department at the Nike campus. Nice people. Nice city. Great potential. No red flags.
Next we sat down with Ann and Paul, Amy’s parents, whose advice we’d always respected. We met them for lunch, and Amy launched into a detailed description of this incredible job offer from this prestigious company. Okay, Portland, but she was so excited as she told them about it that she could barely contain herself.
Their response was immediate and definitive—incredulous, they threw down the gauntlet. How could Amy be so selfish? What about me and my fledgling career? What about the fact that saying yes to this job offer would mean a two-thousand-mile separation between us and our families, all of whom lived right here in the area? Yes, it was a prestigious offer, but that only made it even more likely that she could find something equally prestigious in Chicago, or at least a whole lot closer to home.