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Beautiful Broken Miracle is a memoir‑in‑progress about two lives that never expected to be rewritten. It is a true story.

In our fifties, my husband David and I met at a moment when both of our lives had been profoundly shaped by illness, trauma, and loss.

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I had been living in New York City, disabled since my college years. Since 1994, I had been unable to eat solid food due to a severe oesophageal illness, alongside post‑viral syndrome. In October 2021, my beloved mother died. She had contracted COVID while trapped in a rehabilitation facility after recovering from surgery during the early outbreak in New York City. More than eighty people died in that facility, and somehow my mother survived that ordeal. She died a year later, while still rehabilitating after another surgery.

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Her death left me unmoored and grief‑stricken. Only 2 weeks later, I myself fell gravely ill with COVID, developing lung complications that took more than a year and a half to recover from. During that time, I relied on a walker to regain mobility.

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At the same time, my oesophagus narrowed to just six millimetres, requiring seven dilation surgeries. Financially and physically depleted, I was forced to leave my apartment. Grief, illness, and exhaustion converged into a state where even the idea of hope felt unreachable. All my life I had always had a will to live, but now that will seemed gone and nothing I did could garner it back into being.

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One day, while clearing out my mother’s bedroom, an old Bose radio CD player—long thought broken—suddenly came to life. It played Tony Bennett’s “Just in Time,” a song about two people who had nearly given up on life, only to find each other at the moment they needed it most. I remember looking up at the ceiling and saying, “That’s beautiful, Mom—but what does it have to do with me?” At the time, I could not see any connection to renewal or hope.

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A few months later, I connected with David, a man in Scotland who had left city life during the pandemic on his doctor’s advice, seeking peace in a small rural farming village.  For a few months, he found it. Then circumstances shifted, and what had once felt healing became deeply disturbing and destabilising. The environment began to mirror his severe childhood trauma, and the weight of cumulative loss and heartbreak overwhelmed him. He suffered a breakdown and began to contemplate ending his life. He saw no way forward.

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Two months after the song played in my mother’s room, David and I found each other—just in time—when neither of us believed there was any hope left. That message from my mom in the form of a song from one of her favorite crooners had come true. 

Two disabled people carrying trauma, illness, and emotional exhaustion met and fell in love. Slowly, together, we began to rebuild what had been shattered. We started to heal and to step out of the separate nightmares we had each been living.

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This memoir tells the story of the lives we lived before we met—the illness, trauma, and circumstances we survived.  The life we are now building together in a rural farming village in Scotland is a story of love, recovery, connection, and the return of hope after it seemed completely lost. 

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We are still living this story as it unfolds.

Planned completion: 2027
Seeking literary representation