On bad days, when pain crawled up my spine and made everything feel impossible, he’d sit on the floor beside my chair and say, “Tell me what you can do today. Not what you can’t.”
Somehow, he made life feel wide again.
Then—because life likes to prove it can still surprise you—he got sick.
It started small. Lost keys. Forgetting appointments. Sitting halfway up the stairs with his head bowed like he was listening to something only he could hear.
“Just tired,” he’d snap when I asked.
But the pauses got longer.
The breathlessness got worse.
And one afternoon, after a doctor’s visit he insisted I skip, he came home with paperwork in his hands and the kind of silence that has teeth.
Hospice arrived two months later.
I watched the strongest person I’d ever known begin to fade, inch by inch. The house filled with quiet voices, soft footsteps, and the steady beep of machines that made my stomach clench.
