I had given him back being known.

Being loved out loud, in the open, for exactly who he was.

He had thought his life was in his hands.

It was in ours, all along.

That is the thing I most want anyone who reads this to understand, because it was the hardest-won lesson of my husband’s whole life and he learned it almost too late.

He had spent forty years believing that his value was located in his own two hands, in what those hands could do, in the strength and skill and usefulness he could offer the world.

And it was only at the very end, when those hands had failed him, that he discovered his value had never been in them at all.