Evelyn had wept until she could not breathe.

Those two people, my husband’s grieving parents, had earned the right to sit at my bedside.

My own mother and father had forfeited it at a steakhouse, and I had made the forfeiture legal, and permanent, and signed.

There is a quiet justice in who a person chooses to make their family at the end of their life, and I had made mine deliberately, with a lawyer present, in the calmest and most considered way I knew how.

Donald and Evelyn had lost as much as I had — their son, both of their grandchildren, gone in a single morning — and they could so easily have collapsed into their own grief and had nothing left to give me.