Nothing I Did Ever Mattered: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Promises Kept Alone

He kept every promise. It cost him everything. Guerson Emilien was born in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, raised by a single mother who had almost nothing and gave him everything that mattered. She taught him one rule above all others: a man keeps his word. He carried that rule across the ocean, into a restaurant kitchen in Florida, into a twenty-eight year marriage, and into a friendship with a woman he found barefoot on a dark road - a woman with a gift he saw the moment she sat down at his piano and started to sing. What followed was years of showing up. He bailed her out of jail three times. He ran to the pharmacy when she was sick, sat with her through the worst of it, and brought her back to health with his own hands. He offered to build her a music studio. He defended the man she loved to the man she treated like furniture. He answered every call, at every hour, without complaint. Then his wife died in a car accident. And the woman he had given so much to became the only voice that could reach him through his grief. And then she sent him a message that changed everything. Nothing I Did Ever Mattered is the true story of a man who refused to break his promises - even when the people he made them to never saw what they cost him. It is a memoir about love and loss, about the difference between caring for someone and being used by them, about grief that almost destroys you and the voice of a mother that pulls you back from the edge. It is also, in the end, a story about letting go - and why that is not the same as giving up.

Pagina's: 121, Paperback, Independently published