And I agreed, without hesitation, without a second’s doubt, because he was my friend and he was afraid, and because it cost me nothing to give an old man the safety of dying on his own terms.

I did not understand, agreeing, that I was not only protecting my friend.

I was, though neither of us said it and only one of us knew it, coming home.

I have thought since about the strange doubleness of that marriage, the way it meant one thing to me and another, deeper thing to him, and I find in it something almost unbearably tender.

To me, agreeing to marry Harrison was an act of friendship, a kindness to a frightened man, a legal formality that would let a good friend die in peace; I signed the certificate the way you might sign a form witnessing a neighbor’s will.