What I remember most is not the counting down.

It is the ordinary golden abundance of those days: Marcus at the stove in the morning light, moving slowly and deliberately, Lily’s cereal poured with enormous concentration into the bowl; the three of us on the couch in the evenings; the particular sound of my husband’s laugh, which I had not heard nearly enough of in the busy years and which I heard constantly now.

The diagnosis had put a horizon on our life together, a line we could see, and instead of only darkening the days before it, that line did something else too.

It made every ordinary hour luminous.