“I don’t want the state handling my final hours,” he said.

“My last wish is to leave this world as a husband.

Not as a nameless file, a case number, a body with no one to claim it.

Let me die belonging to someone.” And I understood, hearing it, that this was not a romantic proposal in any conventional sense, and not a strange whim of a dying mind.

It was something I recognized, deeply, from my own grief and from a year of sitting with the dying: the profound, human need not to disappear into anonymity, not to end as a form to be processed, but to matter, to belong, to be someone’s, right up until the last breath.

Julian was not asking me to be his wife in any way that would outlast his death, or so I believed at the time.