No one else will ever share the particular meanings these everyday things hold for them. She listed the connections she’d miss: “feeling protected, safe, beautiful, loved.” Her final category was simply “You”: “Your scent. Your smile. Your enthusiasm. Your ideas. Your hugs. Your big strong hands. Your balding head. Your dreams. You, next to me.” When she finished reading, we were all in tears and there was no need to trample the tenderness with any extraneous verbiage. But it is important for the scribe to hear her own words read back to her, so I asked Clive to do so. Then he read his own
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