We spent two beautiful years as husband and wife, in the way that two old friends are husband and wife when the marriage is a shield and not a romance.

He moved me out of the drafty room I shared in the east wing and into his lavish suite, and for the first time in my adult life I slept in a warm bed, in a quiet room, with soft sheets and a view of the sky.

And neither of us was lonely anymore.

That was the great gift of it, for both of us: that two people who had each been so profoundly alone found, at the very end of their lives, someone to be not-alone with.

We spent his final months quietly, gently.