Not for love, in the beginning, though love of a kind grew in that final week.

I married him so that a good and lonely man could die belonging to someone, which is a thing every human being deserves, and which almost no one thinks to provide.

It was the smallest gift, and, I have come to understand, one of the largest: to make a person’s death a matter of love.

I could not refuse him that.

And in not refusing, I received everything.