"I have kept journals since the mid-1960s and continued to do so, both during and after the fifteen months my husband lived with stomach cancer. Bob died in Spetember 2007. Field Notes From Grief : the First Year was shaped from the journals I kept the year after his death (introduced by the two weeks that preceded it). But without my collaborator, Claudia Giannini, whose thirteen color images accompany the text, there would have been no book...We knew from the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful. But it took a while before I fully accepted that my pages were valuable not only as a stimulus for her haunting images, but for what they had to say to tohers. When I moved fromt the private to the public realm, editing became a necessity, a challenge, and a release. Editing the journals to share them, I strove to maintain the spontaneity, contradicitons and, even confusion, of the original; through reading and re-reading them I found the threads that hold them and me together " -- from Author's Preface.