Not loneliness, exactly, since I was already there.

He was asking to die belonging to someone, to have his death be a matter of love rather than of process, to leave the world as a husband, claimed, held, someone’s, rather than as a case number to be closed.

And having watched a year of people face exactly that fear, I understood that this was perhaps the most important thing a person could give another at the end, and that it cost me nothing but a signature and a week of my time, and that to withhold it would be a cruelty I could not live with.

So I married him.