Marcus had done nothing wrong in getting sick; no one chooses a disease, no one earns it, it simply arrives, blind and unfair, and settles on the good and the bad alike.

And yet there he stood, my brilliant blameless husband, hanging his head in front of his own wife as though he had committed some crime, as though the failing of his own body were a moral failure, a thing to be caught at and exposed.

That is what the illness had done to him that was almost worse than what it had done to his hands: it had convinced him that he was now something diminished, something lesser, something that had let us down simply by ceasing to be strong.

I would spend a great deal of the next two years, and arguably the rest of my life, gently taking that shame away from him, one day at a time, insisting to him in a hundred ways that he had nothing to be ashamed of, that a body is not a character, that he was not less of a man for needing to be held.