A few weeks before my wife died, she asked me if I wanted to write a book about our story; after her funeral in May 2001, I still hadn't seriously considered it.I went to London, Ibiza, and Amsterdam, and I spent all my time partying. Finally, in order to heal the pain in my heart, I still decided to write it down, in her way.At this time, I was also preparing to take my three-year-old daughter, Luna, to Australia. We were going to travel around in a campervan, to a new environment, to see all kinds of people, and to experience different feelings. The first notebook was filled up quickly, and then I wrote more than a dozen of them one after another. I suddenly wrote a lot of things with great inspiration, and one picture after another appeared in my mind. Only then did I realize that, How much the death of my wife has hit me, and how deeply all the things we have experienced have affected me.This sad pressure got me done, it has sold over a million copies in the Netherlands and has been published in translations in thirty languages ​​around the world.

Most of the plots in this book are adapted from my real experience, but this is not an autobiography, but a novel about love.In it, Danny's feelings and frustrations are my own experience, but I have a much different personality from him, he is rude and sexist (I am not one of them!), and not everything is real Some of them are made up by me, and some of them are much exaggerated than the truth; but the story of Carmen's death in the third chapter is almost exactly the same as the real one. Dying is an art and my wife is proof of that.If you live your life in fear, you haven't really lived it.Of course, after you find out that you have cancer, you can hold on to the last moment of your life with the feeling that it is better to die than to live; but if you can make your life shine in a limited life, then even if you die, it will not feel so difficult to accept.This is a very important experience for me after seeing my relatives die with my own eyes.

Ray Kluun June 2008 in Amsterdam