Peggy Sturdivant is a freelance writer in Seattle. She writes a weekly column for the Ballard News-Tribune (At Large in Ballard) and SeattlePI.com. She also contributes essays to the Martha's Vineyard Gazette, reveling in a part of the ope-ed page once occupied by Art Buchwald. She is also co-author of "Out of Nowhere" a non-fiction account of a tragedy involving a young woman in the Northwest that led to a safety law called "Maria's Law." Fittingly this rejected essay was accepted by Modern Love Rejects on the seven year anniversary of the day that she posted herself on Craislist to meet a partner with the subject line, "Craigslist Worked When I Sold My Car." It was her best respondent and now husband who introduced her to the Modern Love essays. Her first attempt was in the glory days of rejection when the email came from Daniel Jones. As president of an unofficial Reject's Club in high school she feels in much better company here than she ever would have been in Sunday Styles.

Unprescribed Honeymoon

On what was supposed to be a five-week honeymoon trip I stood on a cliff above the Mediterranean in Portugal and realized I was going to be a widow. I was pregnant; my husband was simmering with fever in our pension bedroom. With a certainty that was never disproven I saw I would be raising our child alone; that his lymphoma was no longer in remission. Jim died three years later at the age of 40; I was a widow at 33.

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