A sick woman, in her own home, cut off from every person in the world who might have saved her, by the two people who were supposed to be her family — and every dollar I sent to protect her had been fuel for the very machine that was killing her.

My sacrifice had not protected my wife.

It had been stolen and turned into the walls of her prison.

I have had to sit with that sentence for a long time, because it is the cruelest thing about the whole affair, crueler even than the neglect itself, and I want to be precise about why.

It is one thing to fail to protect someone you love; that is a grief, but an ordinary one, the grief of limits and distance and bad luck.

It is another thing entirely to learn that your very effort to protect them was converted, without your knowledge, into the instrument of their harm — that the harder you worked, the more you sent, the deeper the harm went.