Over the next two years, the illness did what illnesses of that kind do, and I will not lay out the particulars of it, because the particulars are not the point and because some parts of a person’s decline belong only to the people who loved them.

It took its physical toll, slowly and steadily, and there were hard days, and there were harder days, and we met them as they came.

But here is the thing I most want to say about those two years, the thing that surprised me more than anything: the illness took a great deal from Marcus’s body, and it never once touched the heart of our home.

If anything, our home had never been so full.