The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few–or the one. –Spock in Star Trek II–The Wrath of Khan

Have you hugged your spouse today? How about your kids? Your parents? The other people in your life you care about? Have you told them how you feel about them?

A couple of weeks ago I put up the small Christmas tree I bought last year and hung the ornaments Jane had made over the years we were together. Each ornament was like a kiss on my fingers but also like a tear in my heart. Decorating the house for Christmas was a shared act of love for us–and she made me promise before she went into the hospital that no matter what the outcome was I would put up a tree and decorate the house.

Every day was made up of those small acts of love: creating a small surprise at breakfast, sharing dinner at night, massaging her feet as we graded papers on the couch, her massaging my neck and shoulders on a long drive…

Her death sealed all those small acts of mutual kindness. They are both the pain and the joy of my current life.

We expected to grow old together–to slowly decline into old age and death–and when one of us died there would be the solace for the remaining spouse that their own end would not be so far away as to be too troubling.

NET destroyed that dream.

At this moment, somewhere in America, it is destroying that dream for another couple.

And it will keep on doing that until we have more answers than we have now.

Last year I meditated and prayed and fasted and meditated and prayed and ate and prayed and meditated. I focused energy on my wife’s immune system, on her heart, on her liver, on the tumor in her appendix. We found the best doctors we could possibly have found–and we searched and begged for a miracle.

The miracle we wanted never happened. If it had, Jane would be alive and on the road to full recovery. We would have put up the big tree and taken out all the ornaments. We would be bathed in joy.

That miracle would have saved Jane’s life.

But would it have saved anyone else’s? Would this site exist? Would I have met the people I have met? Would I have written what I have written? Would I have done what I have done? Would others? We  cannot know.

I wish she had not suffered through a month of rising and falling hopes–that her death had come more easily. But if it had, would we have built the relationships with her doctors and nurses and technicians that we did? Would her illness and death have had the impact people tell me it had on them?

Jane and I did not get what we wanted. But perhaps the broader world will be different in a positive way because we did not.

I have to hope so.