All the ordinary moments he had given away to his career came flooding back to us, and we did not waste a single one.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the strange arithmetic of it.

The disease was taking Marcus from us.

And yet in taking him out of that operating room, in stripping away the title and the scalpel and the endless shifts, it had also, cruelly and unexpectedly, given him back to us, given us a version of him we had never fully had in eleven years of marriage: present, unhurried, entirely here.

I would not have chosen the trade.