Yuko Ninomiya Heberlein spent 11 years writing about the life she built with her husband and the disease that took him. The result, "Arc: Life Between Two Unwinnable Wars: WWII and ALS," is the 86-year-old Concord resident's first book.

A childhood shaped by war, a life rebuilt in music.

Heberlein, who now lives at Newbury Court, grew up in postwar Japan, where food was scarce and the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shaped everyday life. She left her hometown of Matsuyama for the United States in the 1960s to study classical violin at the University of Minnesota, arriving with little English. That first year in America, she's said, felt liberating — a fresh start after a childhood defined by scarcity and loss.

A marriage forged between two people who understood loss.

In 1967, she met German physicist Joachim "Jockel" Heberlein at a university party — his own childhood shaped by war, hunger and loss as well. They married, raised two children, camped across the American West, traveled to six continents, and always returned home to Minnesota's Lake Gilfillan. Yuko went on to play first violin with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra during her career there, according to an earlier profile.

When the stage became a rehearsal for something harder.

Then came Jockel's ALS diagnosis — progressive, fatal, and unforgiving. As he lost the ability to care for himself, Yuko became his full-time caregiver, drawing on decades of stage experience to find her footing in an entirely new role. "My stage experiences taught me to stay in touch with myself," she writes in the memoir. "Jockel's caregiver was my new role to perform." He died in 2013 at 74, after 46 years of marriage.

Grief that became a shape, not just a loss.

Heberlein didn't start writing right away. She walked beside Lake Gilfillan, reflecting, certain she was a violinist and not a writer. But she kept at it for more than a decade — revising, rewriting — until she began to see her own life not as loss, but as a shape: a marriage framed by two forces no one could control, World War II at its beginning and ALS at its end. Writing, she said, is what saved her and helped her heal.

A new chapter, chosen on her own terms.

After Jockel's death, Heberlein eventually left their Minnesota home of 36 years — choosing to downsize herself rather than leave that burden to her children, daughter Andrea, a neuroscientist at Boston College, and son Marcus, who lives in Japan with his family. At Newbury Court, she's built a new community in Concord, and still performs Bach, Beethoven and Brahms on violin — the thread that's run through her entire life, from a girl in postwar Japan to a widow writing her way toward peace.

The memoir is available on Amazon. No Concord-area reading or signing has been scheduled yet.