Full of ideas, airborne, self-absorbed, and slightly escapist, but loving you before I’ve met you, I’m Julie Parker. The more flawed and foiled you are, the more I’m drawn to you. Curiously, I am wed to Peter Parker, yes, Spiderman, but predating him, Spiderman’s grandfather. True to his name, my mate is everything I am not: protective, responsible, vigilant, selfless, and an expert at rescuing me from my own adventures. I have sent him crawling up the wall many a time.

Slightly people-averse, Peter prefers the soft quiet of forests where his pruners nip away at intruding limbs and no one asks him how it felt when his dad burned up his tinker toy set. Hadn’t he just set the playroom on fire? Peter co-stars in Journey Beyond Despair because we have twined together like two old oaks with fused roots, almost indistinguishable.

When Peter and I reached our 90s, in great health, in our home of 50 years, loving life and each other since our Middlebury College years, I knew there was something unusual about this. We are the one couple in a thousand that makes it to their 70th anniversary. No twosome could be more opposite. How did we get here? One thing stands out: we were struck with a near-fatal catastrophe early in our marriage. That is what Journey Beyond Despair is all about.