I do not know whether our marriage could have survived his illness.
But I know we might have faced it together.
That possibility became its own kind of mourning.
Love does not mean removing every burden from another person’s life. Sometimes love means allowing someone to stand beside you while the burden is still heavy.
Troy believed he was sparing me by keeping me outside his suffering.
But intimacy cannot grow in the dark. It needs truth, even when the truth hurts. It needs humility. It needs the courage to say, I am afraid, and I need you with me.
In the end, the greatest wound was not the illness he hid.
It was the life we lost because he believed love meant facing pain alone.