My husband, Trevor, had died four years earlier, so I had been raising our son, Bryce, alone.
He was the center of my life, and for a long time, I thought the worst thing that could ever happen to us had already happened when we lost Trevor.
I was wrong.
A year before Bryce died, he had been a healthy nineteen-year-old who stayed up too late, left empty glasses in his bedroom, and promised he would clean his car “tomorrow” for three weeks straight.
Then one afternoon, he became dizzy while walking through the kitchen and collapsed before I could reach him.
At first, doctors thought it might be something temporary. Then came blood tests, scans, referrals, and appointments with specialists whose names I could barely pronounce.
Finally, one doctor sat across from us and told us Bryce had a rare progressive neurological disease.
There was no cure.
I remember staring at the doctor and waiting for the second half of the sentence.
There had to be something else.
Another hospital. Another specialist. An experimental treatment. Anything.
Instead, he gently explained what we could expect as the illness progressed.
I refused to accept it.
Over the following months, I sold my car and began taking buses to work. I sold several pieces of family jewelry I had kept for years, including the bracelet my mother had given me on my wedding day. Nearly every bit of savings Trevor and I had built disappeared into consultations and treatments.
Whenever someone mentioned another specialist, I found a way to pay for the appointment.
Whenever someone told me about another option, I chased it.
But Bryce kept getting weaker.
Some mornings, he needed help getting out of bed. Eventually, walking across the room exhausted him.
I could not understand how life expected me to lose him too.
I had already buried my husband. Now I was being told I might bury the boy I had raised almost entirely on my own and then return to a house where no one was waiting for me.
I had imagined Bryce growing older. I had pictured him falling in love, bringing someone home for dinner, getting married, and complaining to me someday about his own children leaving glasses all over the house.
