'My Maggie': A powerful and inspiring love story

In his book “My Maggie,” Richard King writes a powerful, complex, and memorable love story about his childhood sweetheart and wife of 32 years. Diagnosed with hearing loss at the age of four, Maggie wore cumbersome hearing aids and felt the humiliation of being "different." Slowly, an insidious disease robbed her of vision. But she soldiered on, having fought three different cancers, changed careers in the middle of her life and fought to realize her dreams.

Underneath these great challenges, there was an incredible love shared by two people and it was cemented by adversity and reached a near perfect spiritual connection. They lived a classic old-fashioned love story, one of courage and devotion. Read an excerpt:

Chapter 7: The Miracle Worker

It was late when I sat down on the train back to Manhattan. My car was pretty much deserted. I felt like the depressed character in the Twilight Zone who was looking out a dark window to find peace and happiness of bygone times in a quaint village called Willoughby. Sick, tired, and lonely, I thought of my new life all the way back to Manhattan. It would be a new challenge meeting people who have had bad luck and struggle everyday. The last two weeks—leaving Maggie at the airport and the visit to the Helen Keller Center—had convinced me that there would be an element of sadness in almost every day of the rest of my life. It breaks your heart to see people struggling to see, to hear, to walk, or even to speak. It breaks your heart even more when you love someone beset with those problems.

I had to learn to live with a new set of standards. I had to learn to talk to Maggie and her friends just as I would want to be talked to in that situation, as a fellow human being. I realized it would not be an easy thing to do after hearing mournful groans from people with disfigured heads and faces. We all hope to avoid seeing such tragedy in our lives, but I had to understand it and not just give lip service to the basic truth that we are all human beings—whatever our configuration.

While I eventually did face it, on that particular night I could not. I stumbled and coughed my way back to the Plaza, which had an excellent bar off the lobby. The place was alive with people who were drinking, talking, laughing, seeing, and hearing. I took a seat at the bar and poured down more than a few vodka tonics. Within an hour, I was pretty much wasted. I stumbled to my feet, signed the tab, then took a drink to my room. Getting drunk was the only way I could have slept at all that night, and while I knew the worst thing you can do with bronchitis is drink booze, I really had no choice.

To know that Maggie was sleeping in the darkness at Sands Point while she should have been in my arms in a beautiful hotel room was eating me alive. The booze did manage to numb at least some of the pain from one of the lowest points in my life.

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