A Marriage Made in Heaven is a book about eternal love, devastating loss, and the profound healing that came afterward. It is a book about how trusting in God and having an all-powerful faith helped me and my family conquer overwhelming obstacles resulting from an unspeakable tragedy.

A Marriage Made in Heaven is my story, but it involves far more than just me. It is a love story between a Nigerian man–a medical student studying in America who was born into a royal family, and a teenage girl raised in Queensbridge, one of the biggest housing projects in New York City. It’s a story that shows how two people from vastly different cultures beat the odds to pursue their dreams and aspirations, and how they created a beautiful family together, as they lived the American dream.

This book is also the story of my devoted husband, Dr. Ferdinand Ukah, the loving father of our four children, and an extremely gifted transplant surgeon. It’s about a man who, at the peak of his sky rocketing career, demonstrated the ultimate gift of love by traveling to a remote Nigerian village to perform a lifesaving procedure on his father under austere conditions.

A Marriage Made in Heaven is also about how our lives were cruelly upended in an instant by the sudden, brutal murder of my husband in a faraway country the day before he was to leave Nigeria to come safely home to us. I describe the shock of seeing my mother, living a thousand miles away in New York City, standing unexpectedly at my front door in Mobile, Alabama, and knowing instinctively that she was bearing terrible news.

I talk about telling my four young children of their father’s death. I describe the sudden realization of the difficulties I was unprepared to face as I grieved my husband. I also speak of the secrets surrounding Ferdinand’s death and how it took me years to find out exactly what happened the day he died. I describe the heart-breaking experience of packing up and moving from what had been the opportunity of a lifetime, where we were living in the home of our dreams.

While this book addresses the tragedy of Ferdinand’s death and the aftermath we faced as we dealt with his irreplaceable loss, it is infinitely more than that one experience. This book, above all else, is a tribute to love, and hope, and faith. It is about the powerful, eternal love Ferdinand and I continue to share even though he passed away well more than 20 years ago. It is about the generous outpouring of love and support we received from our wonderful neighbors, friends, and church community as we moved back to Iowa City and reestablished ourselves in the wake of Ferdinand’s death.