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Under the best of circumstances, it's tough to talk about very long relationships. So much of it has its own private context and meaning. It's far too easy for others to filter it through their own experiences and draw the wrong conclusions.

Most people reading this simply will not have had a close relationship to anyone for five decades. Can you really extrapolate from a two-decade long marriage what five decades should mean?

I doubt it.

Writing isn't an exact science, even the best of them fail to pen a single sentence occasionally, and even the worst of them have enough inspiration flowing sometimes to create mind-blowing literature (if only they'd care to write). We can't predict when someone can churn out a bestseller and when he cannot.
It doesn't help that the link between mind-blowing literature and bestsellers is tenuous.
While it's a nice story, am I missing something about the title? The part about not being able to write is only briefly referenced a couple times. It's not a subject of the article.
He's referencing the fact that he wasn't the one to write his wife's obit for the same paper, months earlier: https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/06/14/the-indy-500-....

FTA:

"When Mike is ready he will tell you himself of the love of his life, his college sweetheart, who would become his partner for more than half a century, a woman of grace and beauty and intelligence."

And he did tell of the love of his life.

But he didn't tell of his trouble writing that story. He left that as a quick mention of a story, to be told another time or never at all.

It would be equally unfitting to title this article "I talked to my grandson about death" even though it's a poignant emotional moment and it's clear what he means. It's not what the article is actually about.

Article titles, especially for creative or personal stories, aren't always summaries of the article's contents.

It serves as an introduction, and frequent readers of his column will know that his wife died several months ago and that it was too painful for him to write the obituary himself at the time. Mike Littwin is one of the more well-known journalists in Colorado, and has been publishing a regular opinion column for years.

This is like complaining that the clockwork orange is only briefly mentioned in A Clockwork Orange.

It's not a book title, it's a headline that forms a complete sentence and describes a topic.

It's a bad introduction to hand you a plot thread that's never properly woven in to the work that follows.

You are not the primary target audience for the article. The many colorodoans who have read his column for years have the context to understand what his title is referencing.

I think it's a way more compelling than a more straightforward alternative. It hooks you from the start, because you want to know why he couldn't write about her, and the explanation doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Reading the article makes it clear how much he loved her and how painful this has been. Spelling it out explicitly would just detract from the story - he wants to focus on her, not his own pain.

> You are not the primary target audience for the article. The many colorodoans who have read his column for years have the context to understand what his title is referencing.

Again, I knew what it was referencing. That's not sufficient for a good title.

> It hooks you from the start, because you want to know why he couldn't write about her, and the explanation doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Reading the article makes it clear how much he loved her and how painful this has been. Spelling it out explicitly would just detract from the story - he wants to focus on her, not his own pain.

That was obvious from the very start! The article doesn't slowly and implicitly build an understanding of that. It's something you know from the very first sentence, static and unchanging.

It's not a bad article. It does slowly build a detailed and emotional understanding of the relationship. But none of that development gives any more insight into why he couldn't write. It's just a broad stroke of a background detail as far as the article itself is concerned. The details of that personal journey are left untold.

> Spelling it out explicitly would just detract from the story - he wants to focus on her, not his own pain.

I'm definitely not saying he should be spelling it out in the article devoted to the story of his wife. I'm saying that the title is wrong. He could write about his own pain later, if he wanted to. And the title would be appropriate for that article, not this one.

Sorry but how are you not understanding? He couldn’t write about her because it was too hard because of her death.

I thought this was a beautiful tribute.

> Sorry but how are you not understanding? He couldn’t write about her because it was too hard because of her death.

That's not what I'm talking about...

Okay, let me start completely over:

I understand what the title is talking about.

I think the article is fine.

But I don't think this title fits with this article.

Is that a clear explanation?