We knew what we had.

We knew it was finite.

And so we did not waste it, and there is a kind of joy available in that knowing that most people, rushing through their unnumbered days, never get to feel at all.

I do not recommend the path we were forced to take to it.

I would give it back in a heartbeat, the whole hard-won wisdom of it, for a few more ordinary decades of taking each other for granted.

But since we were not given that choice, since the choice was taken from us, I have tried to be honest about the strange gifts that were folded into the grief, because to deny them would be to lie, and because Marcus would not have wanted his last two years remembered as nothing but a slow sorrow.