I called the homeopath from the lawn of the big white farmhouse in Litchfield, where my wife was attending the women’s writing retreat. Proprioceptive writing, it was called. Monica hoped this would help her heal her relationship with her mother. I had rented a bike so I could explore the Berkshires during her sessions, when I’d be freed from my caregiving duties.

In my opinion, her homeopath, Rita, was pleasant and well-meaning but a whack job. Glioblastomas are not caused by a bad relationship with your mother, and they aren’t cured by taking homeopathic remedies or writing workshops. I called because she wanted to know if her latest adjustment to the remedies had made a difference. No, I said. And I told her what my biggest fear was. What if Monica didn’t die? What if she just got increasingly disabled but lived a normal lifespan? She was 49, that could be another thirty years or more. Things were already bad. Left arm paralyzed, left leg barely able to move. Needing help to and from a toilet or a shower. Left side of her face paralyzed. Right half of her skull hairless. On a massive regime of steroids and antiseizure meds, with the steroids having bloated her body and face to render her unrecognizable as the beautiful woman she once was and now grieved the loss of. And me, her husband of twenty years, as primary caregiver.

It all started a few years earlier with a text from my then 9-year-old son, Jackson. I was on the commuter train heading home from my office in Manhattan. “Mom just choked on Mac n cheese. She is ok now.” His 15-year-old brother grabbed his phone and added: “This is Nick. It was a lot more serious than that. Mom had a seizure.” I arrived in time to see the paramedics loading my wife into the ambulance. The seizure began was when she was standing at the stove making Annie’s Organic Macaroni & Cheese and took a bite from the wooden spoon. It would turn out that nearly all her seizures would be provoked by a bite of food. I’d sit across from her at the kitchen island, looking for the twitch of the left eye, which would indicate the onset. I’d rush to her side to hold her, keeping her safe until it passed, while Jackson cried. After dozens of seizures and multiple MRIs, a doctor finally noticed a suspicious artifact, and a needle biopsy was scheduled.

The surgeon met me in the waiting room. The pathology report would take some days, he told me, but he knew what it would say. “Your wife has a grade-3 anaplastic astrocytoma—a slow-growing malignant tumor.” He explained that it is diffuse, “like a smudge,” which means it can’t be surgically removed. And he told me it grows slowly for a time but usually at some point transforms into an aggressive glioblastoma, which has a poor prognosis. He just couldn’t say when. Usually in a few years. “So it’s like having a ticking time bomb in your head,” I said. His one-word answer as he turned and left the room: “Yes.”

My lament to Rita was the only time I openly expressed fear about my life being derailed by decades of caregiving. For one thing, I was pretty certain the tumor was going to end her life, and it would be sooner, not later. I would be there until the end, which according to the statistics would be roughly another year. That wasn’t pessimism—just realism.

Monica had no interest in statistics or prognosis. She didn’t want to hear about it. That was optimism—but also realism. Her reality, of continuing to live a full life to the best of her ability.

Before she got sick, we didn’t have an easy marriage. Monica could be cruel. I could be remote. She projected her insecurities on me. I was boring, unromantic, uninteresting. I lacked ambition and good teeth. I had skinny legs and a pot belly. After a long day of work, I would walk the final block to the steps of our tidy Dutch Colonial in the suburbs with a pit in my stomach and a sense of dread at the abuse I would encounter on the other side of the door.

But I’d taken vows. And we had two young boys. So I kept walking through that door. And as I accompanied her on her journey to the end, we both came to realize what love is. Facing death, we both found new life.

***

We had met in graduate school. She needed a ride home from a party. I remember her wearing a red velvet pantsuit and looking incredibly hot with her long blond hair dancing as she laughed her infectious laugh. I dropped her off at Stonier Hall, the Brutalist brick student housing on College Avenue where she was unfortunate enough to be living as a new graduate student.

I invited her to my place for dinner the following weekend and wooed her with my black bean soup and cornbread, a task made easier by her having been living on bananas and granola bars. She dumped her hometown boyfriend, Doug, and we became a couple.

Monica was fun, outgoing, adventurous, a perfect foil to my shyness and reserve. She was the life of the party; I was the wallflower. She felt safe with me, she told me. I was dependable and reliable. She wasn’t passionately in love with me. I knew, not just because of how she behaved but also because she—never shy to say what she thought—told me so.

The first time we had sex, a few weeks after we met, it was on the narrow bed in her closet-sized dorm room. I knew it wasn’t a good experience for her. Did she miss Doug? Was I an inept lover? Today, I would say both were probably true. But back then—well, I was smart enough to keep my failure in perspective. After all, I had read Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont’s classic exposé of the myth of romantic love, so I knew that just because we didn’t have the passion of Tristan and Isolde, and that our most intimate, physical relationship was unsatisfying rather than transcendent—well, that wasn’t a fatal flaw. In my early thirties, seven years older than Monica, I was ready for marriage and a family.

We barreled ahead, towards our shared goal of marriage (and mine of kids). Her, because I represented safety and security, and me, because I wanted a wife and future mother of my children, and she would be just fine.

“Fine.” A word that drove Monica crazy. “I don’t want ‘fine’,” she’d tell me.

For her fortieth birthday, I wanted to give her more than “fine.” We arranged for her parents to watch the boys and flew to Anguilla. But the resort I had booked wasn’t fine enough. I scrambled to find an upgrade, a luxurious resort on the other side of the island, where we had a suite all our own right on the beach.

That night, after a grilled seafood dinner on the patio, we were dancing under the stars as a live band played Motown hits. Suddenly, Monica turned away in disgust at my inept efforts to match her sexy moves. She was fantastic on the dance floor. Me, however, trained as a ballet dancer (my first career), had classical training imbedded in my bones and muscles. Had a choreographer given me the steps and time to rehearse, I could have managed, maybe. But to Monica, I was an embarrassment. She headed back to our room.

Some years later, I did some sessions with a therapist, Elizabeth. I would relate the most recent episode of cruelty inflicted on me by my wife. Elizabeth’s eyes would widen in disbelief, and she would say, “She did what??” I was making her depressed. I could leave, she said, or I could stay, but Monica wouldn’t change. I chose staying. And stopped seeing the therapist.

***

Brain cancer is awful for many reasons. There are the effects of the disease itself but also of the barbaric treatment, usually a craniotomy, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. Monica tolerated the chemo well. The radiation was worse, and if she had known how severe the side effects would be she probably would have refused it. The radiologist mentioned the treatment would cause her hair to fall out on the right side of her head, adding that “it usually grows back.” It didn’t. The surgeon mentioned that a resection ran the risk of impairing motor and cognitive function, and Monica’s third craniotomy, three years into the disease, rendered her left side paralyzed.

What Monica lamented most was losing her looks. Not just her hair but her radiant smile. She considered her smile her best feature and found it beyond cruel that it was gone. This bothered her more than the prospect of an early death, except for her knowing she wouldn’t be here for her boys.

Despite that, however, Monica’s attitude was overwhelmingly one of gratitude. For her friends, and their steadfast love and support. For her sister, Ewa, who came to live with us the final weeks of Monica’s life. And for me, her husband.

A week after her fourth brain surgery, Monica posted a photo on her Facebook page, of me passed out asleep on the hospital bed next to hers, and wrote:

This is the man I’m so grateful to be married to–he’s been exhaustedly by my side during this endless hospital ordeal and has been such an incredible role model for our 2 lucky boys about what it means to show up for someone. I feel so blessed.

A few months later, the tumor exploded (just as the surgeon said it would). We stopped treatment. I gathered our sons into Nick’s bedroom. They sat on the bed while I gave them the news. Treatment had failed; the tumor was going to cause their mother’s death, and in months, not years. I don’t think Nick was completely surprised but I’ll never forget the stricken look on his younger brother’s face. I gave them each a hug. It’s all I could do.

Monica and I settled into our final routine. Our aide, Mirian, would arrive to help with the diapering, dressing, and getting Monica from the hospital bed in the sunroom to the dining room, where she had a view of the birds in the backyard. Mirian would make the tea and oatmeal while I dressed the wound on her scalp, wiping the discharge away and applying the antibiotic ointment—a ritual both antiseptic and loving. (With every surgery, closing Monica’s wound required some skin to be lost, which meant the remaining skin was pulled ever more taut over her skull, until it reached a point where the sutures wouldn’t hold.) My job was to keep the quarter-sized opening exposing her brain from getting infected. That done, I was off to work.

During the day, friends would drop by. In the evening, we would watch Chris Matthews and Monica would rail about Trump. We didn’t talk about death, and she never expressed any self-pity. Her heart was full of the love of her friends, and when her sister came and stayed with us, most of what was heard in the house was their laughter.

She expressed her gratitude to me as well. Gone was the criticism, the disparagement, the hard wall erected to keep me at bay. One evening near the end, she thanked me for caring for her and then said, in a tone of bemused surprise, “If I could, I think I would have sex with you.” The words were both welcome and heartbreaking, as I wondered whether I could have possibly broken through her defenses without her dying. Could I have tried harder? Done more? Been better? I’m not sure I know the answer.

On September 28, 2017, I was holding Monica’s hands as she took her last breath, four and a half years after her first seizure. Her final words had been two days earlier, as Ewa bent over the bed to give her a goodnight kiss. “I love you,” Ewa said. Monica turned her head ever so slightly toward her sister and opened her eyes. “I love you, Ev.”

It was awful for my sons to lose their mother so soon—Nick was 20 and Jackson was 14—but they’ve grown into strong and capable young men. I’d like to think their watching me be there for their mother helped. I know they noticed.

Recently Nick called and asked me to visit. Actually, it was more than an ask. He said, “I need my Dad.” This was a first. He has always been independent and self-reliant, both as a kid and a young adult. I arranged to spend the next weekend with him, while his girlfriend was out of town. I knew what had prompted his request. The cat he had practically grown up with—and which I had only recently sent to live with him—was mortally ill and his death was approaching.

Keechi, our beautiful green-eyed cat, all black except for eight or ten strands of white hair on his chest, had lost a third of his weight. You could feel each vertebra and rib as you petted him. He could still get around, but the disease was progressing and he would soon be too weak. There was only one thing Nick could get him to eat—a tuna and scallop mousse diluted with water, which Nick carefully prepared and watched him slowly swallow, while keeping Keechi’s robust if not rotund brother, Meechi, from poaching it.

“This makes me think about you with Mom,” he said, quietly. It was a striking moment, since he doesn’t talk much about his mother. But not surprising. The difference is of degree not kind. Nick was away at college during his mother’s final weeks. For Keechi, Nick was now in my role, sharing my experience caring for a dying loved one, and showing me what care and commitment look like.

The concern I had expressed to Rita, fretting about a life consumed by caregiving, didn’t come to pass. Monica’s having brain cancer and dying so young was tragic. Yet it was a good death, with Monica enveloped in love—the love of her friends, her sister, and, most of all, her husband. I was there for the entire journey, as difficult as it was. As she wrote in that Facebook post, I showed up. I’d like to think I’m a better man for it, and maybe my boys are too.

William Bartlett is an avid cyclist and retired corporate speechwriter in New Jersey. During a long career, he published many articles and op-eds, but nothing with his name on it except a history book titled NBC and 30 Rock: A View from Inside. He enjoys cooking and taking bikepacking trips with friends. He earned a PhD in English from Rutgers University in 1995 and entered the corporate world because the academic job market sucked and he had just gotten married. Since retiring, he’s been writing personal essays, including one that was recently published in sneaker wave magazine. He has a business website at williamvbartlett.com and blogs about his cycling adventures at wphooligans.com.