And having watched a year of people face exactly that fear, I understood that this was perhaps the most important thing a person could give another at the end, and that it cost me nothing but a signature and a week of my time, and that to withhold it would be a cruelty I could not live with.
So I married him.
Not for love, in the beginning, though love of a kind grew in that final week.
I married him so that a good and lonely man could die belonging to someone, which is a thing every human being deserves, and which almost no one thinks to provide.
It was the smallest gift, and, I have come to understand, one of the largest: to make a person’s death a matter of love.
I could not refuse him that.
And in not refusing, I received everything.
Chapter 4 — A Yellow Sweater and a Pull Tab
