He didn’t deserve this.Not after everything he had already been through.Not after he had finally found peace.Found us.A man who had lost his family… who had rebuilt himself from nothing… who had chosen to love again.And now he was being taken away.
From me.
From our children.
It wasn’t fair.
None of it was.
“Do you need any help?”Jack’s voice pulled me back to the present.
I was at the restaurant, moving through my routine, checking on things, making sure everything was running as it should. I hadn’t even realized how tired I must have looked until I saw the concern in his eyes.
“No, I’m fine for now,” I replied, forcing a small smile.
“You don’t look it,” he said gently. “You’ve lost weight. Are you even catching any sleep?”
I exhaled slowly, pushing the exhaustion down where it belonged.“I manage what I can,” I said. “Don’t worry.”I paused for a second before adding softly, “Cole’s the one in pain. I wish I could do more for him.”
Jack’s expression softened.
“Being there for him during this time is the best that you can do,” he said. “You’re doing more than enough already.”His hand came to my shoulder in a comforting squeeze.“I’ll come over to help you out,” he added, pulling me into a brief hug.
I nodded, leaning into it for just a second longer than I normally would.
Because even the strongest people needed something to hold onto sometimes.
Cole still triedto go to the gallery on the days he had the strength, but those days were becoming fewer. More often than not, he slept late into the afternoon, his body refusing to cooperate no matter how much he willed it to.
I began to measure our time not in days anymore, but in moments—good ones and bad ones, each one slipping through my fingers far too quickly.
“Easy, honey,” I whispered one morning as I sat beside him on the bed.
I gently lifted his leg and turned it over the edge, careful not to hurt him, then did the same with the other. His body felt lighter and heavier all at once—lighter because he had lost so much weight, heavier because of what it meant. I wrapped my arm around him and helped him sit up, my movements slow, deliberate, as if I could protect him from the reality of what was happening just by being careful enough.
“Can you open the curtains, please?” he asked softly.
I nodded and stood up, walking over to the window. When I pulled the curtains apart, sunlight flooded the room.
The sky outside was a clear blue, dotted with soft white clouds drifting lazily in the breeze. It looked like one of those perfect days—calm, beautiful, untouched.
I wished we could step into that world and leave everything else behind.
He came downstairs that day and stayed there until evening. He sat with the children, watched television, and even managed to eat all three meals at the dining table. Moments like those felt like victories now, ones I held onto with everything I had.
But a week later, even that became too much.
He stopped going to the gallery altogether.
He stayed at home, and I adjusted everything around that. I brought in a wheelchair so he wouldn’t have to strain himself walking, and we installed a stairlift so he could move between floors without exhausting himself completely. Every change we made felt like another quiet acknowledgment of how much things had shifted.
There were moments when I would sit beside him, feeding him slowly, watching his face as he tried to swallow, and I would wonder what to say.
I knew he was suffering.
I knew talking would only tire him more.
So I stayed quiet.
