No one would.

But I learned, in those two years, to be fiercely grateful for what was inside it, for the husband and father who sat at our table every single night, fully ours at last, right up until the end.

People sometimes speak of the time after a terminal diagnosis as though it is nothing but a countdown, a grim waiting for the inevitable, and I understand why, and there were certainly nights when it felt exactly like that.

But that was not the whole of it, and it was not even the largest part.