Loving Him More When He Walks Out the Door

A daily reminder of mortality can be more gift than burden.

Six weeks after we married, my husband got a phone call from his mother, and we rushed to the hospital. His aunt Lona lay in the intensive care unit after a bad headache at breakfast turned out to be a ruptured brain aneurysm, and there was nothing more the doctors could do.

Ten family members gathered around Lona’s bed. The chaplain asked Lona’s daughter, age 17, if there was anything she would like to do for her mother before they disconnected the machine.

“I want to paint her toenails,” she said.