DON’T GO WHERE I CAN’T FOLLOW

This beautiful little book came out sometime around when Meg and I got married. It is a document of Anders Nilsen’s relationship with his fiance, Cheryl Weaver, who died of hodgkins lymphoma in 2005. It reads somewhat like a heartbreaking, full-color issue of FOUND magazine dedicated to a couple: there are scanned postcards, hand-written letters on notebook paper, ticket stubs, photographs, and of course, Nilsen’s wonderful comics.

For obvious (or not so obvious?) reasons, I stayed far away from this book until a good time had passed since our wedding. (It was difficult — until now, I’ve read every work of Nilsen’s as soon as I could get my hands on it. He is one of my favorites.) About a month ago, I read THE END, which is actually something of a sequel to DON’T GO. DON’T GO finally came in the mail today (yes, it arrived with the steaks), and I read it tonight in one sitting.

What to say about this book? What you say about all great books: as little as possible.

Buy it. Read it. It does what great art does best: makes you stop and look around. Makes you want to keep on living.

All day I had been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut, and after reading this book, I thought of a little something he asked of all of us: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”