FOR FOUR YEARS, MY TERMINALLY ILL GIRLFRIEND REFUSED EVERY TIME I ASKED HER TO MARRY ME. THEN, SIX DAYS BEFORE HER FINAL SURGERY AT WILLOWCREST MEDICAL CENTER, SHE TOOK MY HAND AND SAID, “ETHAN, MARRY ME.” WEEKS AFTER HER FUNERAL, HER LAWYER CALLED AND SAID, “NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY SHE CHANGED HER MIND.”

I knew Eleanor Whitmore was sick before I fell in love with her.

What I didn’t understand was how little time her body might actually give us.

My name is Ethan Cole.

We were twenty-seven when we met in Bellmere.

At that age, serious illness still felt like something that happened to somebody else.

Older people.

People in tragic news stories.

Not the woman sitting across from me laughing because I had accidentally typed her name as “Eleanora” in a text and then spent three weeks refusing to admit autocorrect had beaten me.

Eleanor had a rare autoimmune disease.

At first, she made it easy to underestimate.

She joked about hospital gowns.

Named her IV pole Stanley.

Whenever a nurse asked her to rate her pain from one to ten, she would ask:

“Emotionally or physically?”

The nurses loved her.

So did I.