And what I have come to understand since is that honoring the wishes of the dead, even when it costs you everything, even when every instinct screams to refuse, is one of the last and truest acts of love available to us, precisely because the dead cannot know whether we did it.

That is the strange, pure thing about it.

Mark would never know whether I signed those papers or tore them up.

He was gone; he could not be disappointed, could not be grateful, could not witness my choice at all.

Which meant that keeping his wish was not for his sake, in any sense he could feel — it was purely an act of love offered into silence, given to a person who could not receive it, honored for no reason except that it was right and that I had promised and that love does not stop being love when its object can no longer see it.

I think that may be the highest form the thing takes: to keep faith with someone who will never know whether you kept it.