How 'Better Not Bitter' Iowa author coped with the death of husband
I've covered a lot of traffic-crash deaths.
"Walking down the track, picking up body parts gives you an appreciation for the power of a train," an Ames police sergeant told me in the early 1990s in the hours after a collision, just along the Union Pacific Railroad line, in the central Iowa city that is home to Iowa State University.
Once, as a reporter for the Ames Tribune, I beat the police to a fatal crash on Highway 30 east of Ames. The woman driving had a Bud Light bottle between her legs in a car that had somehow been vaulted by the collision 20 yards or more into a barren, wind-swept winter cornfield. I ran to help, and saw injured and dead passengers, in two vehicles. The paramedics arrived. The helicopters, too. I wrote the story and could not sleep for days. I still see the woman with the Bud Light bottle in my nightmares.
Then there was a motorcyclist who failed to stop on Lincoln Way in Ames and slid into of a pickup truck waiting for a red light. The motorcyclist, a member of my national fraternity, SAE, was beyond rescue. His head impaled on the tailpipe. It was gruesome.
I lived most of my life in a newspaper family in Carroll County, a beer-drinking reach of the state that celebrates that fact, or certainly used to. In the early 2000s, while at the Carroll Daily Times Herald, I wrote a column — The Carroll County Death Lottery, whose kid is next? — about the once-seeming annual death of a teen around graduation and prom. Cell phones and a changing culture curtailed that, for the most part, as we just don't report on as many fatal alcohol-fueled crashes as we did.
All of this is by way of background to explain why the last thing I wanted to read was a book about a drunk-driving death — a murder really — because a vehicle with a drunk driver is a weapon.
So for weeks in 2023, Michelle Cowan's "Better Not Bitter" sat buried three or four books deep in my in-the-process-of-reading living-room coffee table stack, right under half-finished books on U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and the amazing "Strange Angel" and a trilogy on drug gangs.
Cowan, now a resident of northwest Iowa, lost her husband to a drunk-driving murder in the Omaha area in 2009. The driver who killed Joe had a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit. I didn't want to read about this topic. All the stories are sort of the same, right?
Hardly.
Having met the author at the Okoboji Writers' Retreat I decided to give the book a chance — largely based on my respect for the fact that Cowan actually finished the book. Lots of people show up with ideas. It's rare to see someone bring in a completed project. Cowan did. Count me as impressed.
I started reading and the afternoon turned to evening. I read the 200-page book in one sitting.
Cowan's narrative pace is captivating, and the staging of the tragedy, the events and feelings and fallout before and after, is extraordinary. The book is, in a word, inspiring.
You get to know Joe. Really know him. Cowan creates a rich, deeply moving portrait of this most-relatable man, his life and death, and then what she believes is his afterlife.
"It was ironic that Joe's death was alcohol related, since in all the years I was with him, he rarely drank," Cowan writes. "I could probably count on one hand the times he drank any form of alcohol. And, yet, alcohol was responsible for his death."
The book is largely about how Cowan and her daughter worked to build a new normal. But there is a political element.
The death took place in Nebraska where there is no dram-shop law allowing adult victims of drunk-driving crashes and their families to sue bars and other establishments that over-serve alcohol. Iowa does have a stronger dram shop law, so if the crash had happened a few miles to the east, across the Missouri River, in Council Bluffs or Crescent or Missouri Valley, Cowan and her family could have gone after the bar — in this case, the K Lounge in Omaha. "Dram" is a term of measurement for alcohol linked back to 1700s England where bars and pubs were called "dram shops."
In one of the cruelest turns in the book, Cowan writes about reading a memorial in the Omaha World-Herald announcing a potluck lunch and sharing of memories about a departed customer.
"The potluck was for the driver who killed Joe," Cowan writes.
"And now I was reading that a local watering hole had a gathering to honor the driver's life," Cowan continues. "The K Lounge was the bar where she was drinking prior to the crash."
Cowan and her then teen-age daughter lobbied the Nebraska Legislature for a change to the law on drunk driving liability, going so far to enlist the support one of the more admired men in Nebraska — then Nebraska Cornhusker athletic director Tom Osborne, a national-title-winning former football coach and congressman.
"Michelle has chosen to make the world a better place as a result of her tragic experience," Osborne says in a testimonial on the book cover.
Cowan, even with Osborne, runs into a wall of money and influence in the form of the liquor and restaurant lobbies — who make the argument that individual responsibility should prevail.
Along the way, Cowan fights to remain positive -- to help other people -- an inspired trait you see in her today. I interviewed Cowan at the 2023 Okoboji Writers' Retreat. She amplifies and encourages other writers as much as any of the 300 people there.
What's really driven book sales of "Better Not Bitter" is Cowan's belief that there is afterlife communication with the departed.
"There were times that I knew I felt Joe around," Cowan writes of the years after Joe's death. "The energy was different and unexplainable things continued to happen in our home."
Cowan writes about assisted after-death communication (ADC) and how the strategy — "more commonly known as readings with psychic mediums" — has helped.
She details her own journey in this arena.
Perhaps there is another dimension out there. Cowan is convinced and makes a forceful case. Read and decide for yourself.
"Homicide is a crime that has a profound and lasting impact on the victim's family and friends," Cowan writes.
(Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. The roster of writers includes journalists, poets and authors from across the state.)
👍really nice story
Great column! This book was a great read.