Once the secret was gone, once Marcus stopped performing a health he did not have and let himself simply be a man who was ill and loved, something opened up in our marriage that had never been fully open in eleven years.

The armor came off.

The performance ended.

And underneath it was a closeness, a nakedness of the heart, that I am not sure we would ever have reached any other way.

It is a terrible thing to say that a fatal diagnosis gave me the truest version of my husband.

But it did, and I will not dishonor those two years by pretending they were only sorrow.

They were the realest thing we ever had.