What would you do, if you’d just met your soulmate, and then learned that he was dying of cancer? Would you run away to spare yourself the inevitable pain and loss? Or, would you rather stay to salvage every precious moment left of the bliss, and keep it forever in your heart, regardless of the cost you know you’d have to pay?

It happened to me 25 years ago, when I was in the midst of my recovery from codependence. I met this guy, who was going through a very complicated divorce, and we fell in love, hoping that we just needed to wait a couple of months for him to be free, and then we’d be together. But it’s never that easy! Months turned into a year, and what started as a promise for a lifetime of love, bore more and more resemblance to a rescue mission - something that would endanger my newly attained sobriety from relationship addiction. I was forced to make many difficult choices between loving and codependent caretaking.

Finally, his divorce came through, but only a couple of weeks later he learned that he had cancer. Did the gnawing pain of his toxic marriage transform into the deadly disease? Was he waiting too long, so that his body succumbed? It was too late to waste time on regrets.

We were left a month to live out everything that was meant for a lifetime!

Till death do us part.