In the present, siblings Michael and Carolyn arrive at the Iowa farmhouse of Francesca Johnson, their recently-deceased mother, to see about the settlement of their mother's estate. As they go through the contents of her safe deposit box and the will, they are baffled to discover that their mother left very specific instructions that her body be cremated and her ashes thrown off the nearby Roseman Covered Bridge, which is not in accordance with the burial arrangements they had known from their parents. Michael initially refuses to comply, while Carolyn discovers a set of photos of her mother and a letter. She manages to convince Michael to set aside his initial reaction so they can read the documents she has discovered. Once alone, they go through a series of letters from a man named Robert Kincaid addressed to their mother, revealing that he had an affair with her in 1965. The siblings find their way to a chest where their mother left a letter, a series of diaries and other mementos.
JOHN
DONNE (1572-1631) was an English poet and lawyer who lived his life in poverty
and yet so rich with friends (no one is so poor as to have nothing to give; no
one is so rich as to have nothing to receive!); spent his life in womanizing
and traveling until he settled with Anne More, his wife, with 12 children (the
pro-RH advocates will make his life as a case for the quest of quality life;
the anti-RH advocates will make his case into a crusade to defend life); a
brilliant satirist and a charismatic preacher whose sermons exposed the folly
of the sanctimonious (the Christian fundamentalists will disown him; the
Vatican will silence him, even if he's a protestant.) and unveiled the idiocy
of the brainiacs (the atheists will berate him as irrational; the skeptics will
dismiss him as irrelevant). In listening to his sermon, the hearers were confronted
with ironies, metaphors, paradoxes--all intended to plunge them into
existential anxiety and doubt, and in the process, exhorting them to think and
wrestle with God. In this article, I reproduce his famous Meditation XVII where
we find his two most popular quotes -- "No man is an island" and
"For whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee". 