Not the diagnosis, not the decline, and not the end.

In the time since, people have sometimes assumed that the memory I carry of my husband must be a sad one, weighted down by his illness and his loss.

It is not.

Grief and gratitude, I have learned, are not opposites; they live in the same house, and mine live side by side.

When I remember Marcus now, I do not remember the distant, exhausted surgeon who missed the birthdays, the man belonging to a hospital I could not follow him into.

That man has faded almost entirely.