– Cristy Meiners, producer
This interview is, I admit, an untraditional choice for a Valentine’s Day show. After all, the phrase “shocking death” in the book’s description doesn’t leave a lot of room for the holiday’s usual display of chubby babies wielding heart-shaped arrows. This is, instead, a love story that ends tragically… and what happened to the living when the tragedy has passed. Illustrator and author Danny Gregory’s beautiful book A Kiss Before You Go: A Illustrated Memoir of Love and Loss starts with the story of his life with his wife Patti, a vibrant and funny woman, a paraplegic, and the love of his life, who died two years ago in a terrible accident. The rest of the book focuses on Gregory’s pain and confusion over his loss, and his slow realization that life does go on. The book came out of Gregory’s practice of doing an illustration a day — a project he began years ago and developed into an on-line group and a book called Everyday Matters. A Kiss before You Go shows how an artist used creativity to make sense of his grief and pay tribute to the woman he loved.
