Turning Loss Into Legacy: John Robert Adair Transforms Twenty-Five Years of Loss and Reflection Into Words

For most authors, a book begins with an idea. For John Robert Adair, it began with a visit to a museum.

In late 2023, the Las Vegas-based author and part-time tour guide accompanied his daughter to the newly opened U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs. Something about the exhibits, and the words etched alongside them, stopped him in his tracks. He left the museum with the seed of an idea that had, in truth, been growing for over two decades. That idea has now become Just Saying: 1060 Utterly Fantastic Quotes, a collection twenty-five years in the making and published by Native Book Publishers.

The roots of the project reach back further than most readers might expect, to September 11, 2001, and the years of reflection that followed. Adair spent the next two and a half decades collecting quotes, sayings, proverbs, and personal reflections from family members, friends, historians, military veterans, and public figures. What emerged is not simply a book of famous lines. It is, in many ways, a record of how one man processed the hardest parts of being alive.

Chief among those hard parts was the loss of his wife, Marisol, in 2011, after twenty-seven years of marriage. That loss shapes one of the book’s most personal sections, “Death, Loss & Sorrow,” where Adair pairs classic quotes with his own annotations, turning a collection of sayings into something closer to a memoir told in fragments.

One entry carries particular weight. Beside a line drawn from scripture, “Our loss is heaven’s gain,” Adair writes about receiving a handwritten sympathy card from a business associate of Marisol’s shortly after her death, with the quote written at the very end of the note. He has said that both the card and the words brought him a measure of consolation he still carries with him today.

Elsewhere in the same section, he includes an old Tuscarora proverb that has comforted mourners for generations: “They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.” Another line, borrowed from a headstone in Ireland, speaks to the particular ache of losing someone you love, that the pain never fully heals, but neither does the memory ever quite let go.

It would have been easy for Adair to keep a collection like this private, a personal scrapbook of the words that carried him through grief. Instead, he chose to publish it, alongside more than a thousand other quotes spanning sections on faith, leadership, humor, military history, chess, and the American West. The result is a book that resists easy categorization. It is part anthology, part memoir, part inheritance, meant to be passed down the way his own family passed quotes down to him.

Adair is no stranger to processing loss through creative work. In 1996, his brother Robert was murdered in his own home during a lunch break, a tragedy that shook the entire family. Adair has said he channeled much of his grief and anger from that period into a poem written in Spanish, a language he learned during years spent living in Mexico. What began as a letter to his brother eventually became a fully metered, rhymed poem of fifteen stanzas, a project that took nearly three years to complete and that he credits with helping him find, eventually, a measure of peace.

That pattern, turning private pain into something durable and shareable, runs through nearly every chapter of Just Saying. Adair has described the book not as advice from him to the reader, but as a kind of relay, passing along words that were once passed to him by a friend, a stranger, a grandparent, or a stranger’s handwritten note.

The grief section did not come together quickly, and it did not come together alone. Adair credits friends and neighbors for helping him refine some of the book’s most sensitive chapters, reading drafts, suggesting additions, and occasionally pushing back on a passage that needed more room to breathe. That collaborative process mirrors the larger story of the book itself, which drew contributions from more than two dozen friends, family members, and near strangers over the better part of a decade, each one handing over a quote, a notebook, or a memory that eventually found its place on the page.

For readers who have experienced their own losses, the “Death, Loss & Sorrow” section offers something rare: honesty without sentimentality, comfort without pretending the pain isn’t real. Adair does not claim the quotes he collected will fix grief. He simply offers them the way they were offered to him, at the right moment, from the right person, carrying just enough weight to help someone keep going.

Just Saying: 1060 Utterly Fantastic Quotes is now available on Amazon in Kindle, eBook, and paperback formats, along with the author’s own website, https://booksbyjohnrobertadair.com/