Waiting for Tom: A Wife’s 60-Year Tale of Love, Adventures, and Lewy Body Dementia by Sally Devereux is a passionate story of young love, family, and a long lasting marriage.
In this personal memoir, Sally Devereux takes the reader from India to South West London, and from there, with her beloved Tom, to Spain on a motorbike for a one-of-a- kind honeymoon.
After returning to the United Kingdom, they begin their married life in South Wales. As their family grows and opportunity beckons, the adventuresome couple upend their lives by emigrating, with three toddlers, to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
And they don’t stop there. Sally and Tom camp with the family in the Rocky Mountains; sail the Gulf Islands; vacation in Europe, Mexico, and California; and move from house to house and city to city more times than their future grandkids can fathom.
In the end, it is the miserable diseases of Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia that push their love to the limits.
Follow the main characters, Sally and Tom as they confront relationship struggles with an adopted child, with Sally’s mother, and within their own relationship. Will their struggles, combined with the miserable diseases of Parkinson’s and Lewy Body Dementia push their love to the limits?
Excerpt from Waiting for Tom: A Wife’s 60-Year Tale of Love, Adventures, and Lewy Body Dementia:
“Tom and I were sweet sixteen in 1957, the year we met at a high school dance. It was my first ever dance, held at Tom’s school, Wimbledon College.
I attended the Ursuline Convent a block away. These adjacent Catholic schools were in South West London, the town where the famous Wimbledon lawn tennis championships are held.
The dances at the college were reluctantly encouraged by our teachers, the nuns and priests, in the hopes of securing “good” Catholic marriages, the kind approved by the church. Indeed, many marriages between these students occurred over the years.
That night, I felt nervous and shy, longing but also terrified to be asked to dance. I was not one of the popular girls.
Those girls seemed comfortable laughing and engaging playfully with the boys they saw at the bus stop after school.
Because I lived close by, I walked or biked home on my own, hoping for invisibility.
I was too shy to engage with any attention I might receive. It was the encouragement of my friends in school that helped me muster the courage to attend the dance.”
