Her Yes Keeps Saving Me
I proposed to Christa on the same vacation where my body started telling a story I did not yet know how to read.
That is not exactly true, of course. My body had been leaving clues for years: strange visual episodes, fatigue that did not make sense, little neurological oddities I could dismiss one at a time because denial is easiest in small portions. Still, that beach trip has become one of the fixed points in my memory. I was young. I was in love. I was asking the person I loved to build a life with me.
At some point on that same trip, I tried to run on the sand, and my legs felt wrong. Heavy. Uncoordinated. My left leg almost refused to bend. I remember looking down at my own body with confusion, as if it belonged to someone else and I had only been handed temporary access.
Then, later, I got down on one knee in that same body and asked Christa to marry me.
Life rarely arranges itself into clean chapters. It does not say, Here is the love story, and here is the diagnosis story, and here is the part where you learn what kind of person you are. It puts everything in the same frame. The proposal. The bad run on the beach. The future opening. The future narrowing. The joy and the data point.
At the time, I did not know which parts mattered most.
A few months later, I knew more.
The Offer
After I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I told Christa she could change her mind.
I do not remember the exact words. I remember the shape of them. I remember the terror underneath them. I remember trying to give her an exit because it felt cruel not to.
This is not what you agreed to.
That was the real sentence, whether I said it exactly or not.
You agreed to marry me, not this. Not a body with a name attached to its unraveling. Not MRIs, neurologists, medication questions, mobility questions, fatigue, fear, and whatever would come after fear had finished introducing itself. You agreed to a person who could still plausibly imagine being a fairly normal husband. A helpful husband. A husband who could carry furniture, run after kids, take over when things got hard, drive wherever needed, read books aloud at bedtime without turning the page into static.
I was not being noble. I was scared.
I was scared of becoming a burden before we had even started. I was scared she would stay out of obligation. I was scared that love, which had felt so large a few months earlier, might not be large enough for what was coming. Mostly, I was scared that I had made a promise with a version of myself I could no longer guarantee.
We cried for a while.
Then she told me her yes was a real yes.
Not a hesitant yes. Not a provisional yes. Not a yes with fine print quietly accumulating at the bottom of the page.
A real yes.
Nearly a decade later, I still live inside the shelter of that sentence.
What The Sentence Became
The thing about a sentence like that is that it sounds beautiful when it happens, but its real meaning only appears over time.
A real yes is not proven in one dramatic moment. It is proven in repetition. It is proven in the thousand unglamorous acts that never become anecdotes because they are too ordinary, too constant, too woven into the day.
It is appointments and forms. It is listening to symptoms get described again and again. It is watching a spouse become less physically capable and refusing to reduce him to that loss. It is learning which tasks are easy, which tasks are possible, which tasks are technically possible but costly enough to count as bad math. It is carrying more than your share and not pretending that love makes the weight vanish.
It is also not sainthood.
I want to be careful here, because praising Christa as if she is only a symbol would be another way of failing to see her. She is not a stained-glass window. She is my wife. She is funny, brilliant, exhausted, practical, loving, sharp, generous, human. She gets tired because anyone would get tired. She gets frustrated because the situation is frustrating. She has carried more than I ever wanted her to carry, and I do not want to make that sound easy just because she has carried it beautifully.
The broad truth is simple enough: chronic illness does not happen only inside one body. It enters a marriage. It enters a house. It rearranges time, labor, fear, patience, money, sleep, and the quiet expectations people do not even realize they had until they have to grieve them.
Yet the broad truth is not the whole truth.
The whole truth is more specific. It is Christa learning the math of my life with me. Stairs, fatigue, vision, speech, pain, pride. It is her knowing when I am pretending something is easier than it is. It is her understanding which tasks are easy, which are hard, and which look simple from the outside but quietly take half the day from me.
Her yes became logistics. Her yes became patience. Her yes became our life.
Houses, Children, Years
Since then, we have lived almost a whole other life.
We got married. We bought a house. We had Charlotte. We had Rowan. We moved into our second house. We had Wyatt. There were years of work and grief and medical appointments and family gatherings and late-night conversations and bills and small repairs and large decisions. There were ordinary days so full they almost disappeared while we were living them.
There were also the children, which still feels like too small a phrase for the amount of reality they brought with them.
Charlotte, Rowan, and Wyatt are here.
Sometimes I look at that sentence and feel like I have somehow wandered into the good ending of a story I was sure had turned darker. Not an easy ending. Not a simple one. Just good. Full. Loud. Sticky. Tender. Ridiculous. Ours.
When I first told Christa she could change her mind, I think I was imagining a smaller future. I saw decline. I saw dependence. I saw disappointment. I saw all the ways my body might make life harder for the person I loved most.
I did not see Charlotte saying something so sweet that it rearranged the room. I did not see Rowan lighting up the house in the particular way only Rowan can. I did not see Wyatt arriving and stretching our family into its next shape. I did not see the second house. I did not see the accumulated evidence of a life that kept becoming itself, even while my body kept becoming less reliable.
That is one of the strangest parts of chronic illness. Loss is real, and still, it is not the only thing that happens.
The body closes doors. Life opens others. Not as compensation. Not as a lesson. Just because life is bigger than any single fact inside it.
The Love We Actually Have
I do not think our love is stronger because things got hard in some tidy inspirational way.
I think our love is stronger because it had to become more honest.
Early love has a kind of shine to it. It is beautiful, and I do not distrust it. There is nothing fake about the beginning. That first yes mattered. The proposal mattered. The wedding mattered. The version of us that imagined the future with more innocence was real.
Still, the love we have now knows more.
It knows what my body can and cannot do. It knows that I can be afraid and still make jokes. It knows that I can be grateful and still be sad. It knows that Christa can be astonishingly strong and still deserve rest. It knows that disability changes a marriage, but it does not have to become the whole marriage.
It also knows my less tragic defects.
Christa has supported me through worsening disability, which is no small thing. She has also supported me through the daily experience of being married to my insufferable self, which may deserve its own diagnostic code.
That matters too. Love is not only tested by crisis. It is tested by repetition, by irritability, by the same story being told one too many times, by the weird hobby, the overlong explanation, the philosophical tangent that should have ended six minutes earlier. It is tested by the person as they actually are, not only by the noble version they become in an essay.
Christa has loved me through the frightening parts and the annoying parts.
That might be the real miracle.
Again And Again
Recently, I had one of those nights when pain stopped being background noise and became the whole room.
I am used to pain, which is a strange sentence to write. I am used to carrying some level of it around with me, used to it humming beneath the day, used to answering “how are you?” with some version of fine because there is no efficient way to translate the actual answer. Usually, I can place it somewhere. Usually, I can say, this is my normal, even if my normal would frighten someone else.
This was different.
It was severe enough that I wondered if it was my MS. Or whatever my MS is. Even that sentence has become less stable lately. My neurologist has suggested a second opinion because he is not entirely sure if MS is the right name for what has been happening in my body. The diagnosis that once felt like the answer has become, in some ways, another question.
There is something uniquely exhausting about having to reopen the case of your own suffering.
A name can be frightening, but it can also be a container. It gives the chaos a label. It lets you point to the thing and say, there. That. That is what this is. When the name itself becomes uncertain, some old fear comes back into the room. Not because I want MS. I do not. Of course I do not. But I have built almost a decade of understanding around that word. I have mourned through it. Explained through it. Planned through it. Blamed it and hated it and worked around it.
Then suddenly, the question returns: what if we still do not know?
In that state, pain does not stay only physical. It becomes narrative. It starts telling stories about the future. It says everything is getting worse. It says nobody knows what is happening. It says this is the beginning of some new decline. It says the life you have been trying to hold together is more fragile than you thought.
Pain is a terrible narrator.
Christa helped me not believe every word of it.
The next day, she helped schedule an appointment with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She filled out the forms. She helped turn panic into steps, terror into a calendar entry, the unbearable bigness of the unknown into something with a date and a place and a plan.
That is one way she saves me.
Not with a speech. Not by pretending everything is fine. Not by having answers no one has yet. She saves me by helping reality become actionable. She takes the shapeless dread and gives it edges. She says, in effect, here is the next thing.
The next thing is holy when the whole future feels too large to survive.
The Human Handhold
There are also smaller salvations.
A joke at the right time. A look. The sudden return of warmth and humor when my mind has begun building a courtroom for the worst possible future. The fact that she can still make me laugh when I have become convinced that the appropriate response to life is despair, research, and maybe a spreadsheet.
Sometimes she saves me by being beautiful in a dress and reminding me, absurdly and persuasively, that I am still a person in a body, not only a patient tracking symptoms.
Sometimes she saves me by sitting beside me. Sometimes by telling me to rest. Sometimes by understanding that rest is not defeat. Sometimes by helping me go to bed when my brain wants to keep pacing the same loop until morning.
This is not cute. Or rather, it is not only cute.
It is survival at human scale.
I am learning that being saved does not always feel dramatic. Sometimes it feels like being interrupted before the spiral finishes its argument. Sometimes it feels like someone placing a hand on the runaway machinery of your mind and saying, not tonight. Sometimes it feels like the person who knows you best helping you return to the actual room, the actual house, the actual children sleeping nearby, the actual life that is still here.
And it is not only Christa.
Our family has stepped up too. Different people, different ways, all helping make the next part less impossible. That kind of love is humbling because it reveals how false self-sufficiency always was. I would prefer, temperamentally, to need less. I would prefer to be easier. I would prefer to be the one carrying more. But love keeps arriving as help, and I am trying to become less embarrassed by being helped.
Still, Christa is at the center of it.
She is the one who has been here since before the name, through the name, and now into the uncertainty beyond it. She is the one whose yes keeps having to become new forms of yes. The yes of the hospital. The yes of the neurologist. The yes of the second opinion. The yes of the bad night. The yes of forms and phone calls. The yes of three children and a second house and a husband who is still afraid and still here.
The yes that does not merely stay.
The yes that keeps saving me.
How Lucky Can One Life Be
I keep coming back to luck.
Not because luck explains everything. It does not. Christa’s love is not luck in the sense of accident alone. It is character. It is choice. It is endurance. It is the daily labor of making a family and remaking it as conditions change.
Still, from where I sit, luck is part of the truth.
I was lucky that she said yes. I was luckier that, when the facts changed, she said her yes still stood. I have been luckier still to watch that yes become a marriage, a home, three children, and a love that did not remain frozen in its first beautiful form but kept evolving into something sturdier.
I do not know how I got so lucky.
That sentence is not rhetorical. I really do not know. There are moments when I look at my life and feel the difficulty first: the pain, the wheelchair, the vision loss, the speech trouble, the fatigue, the fear of what comes next. Then there are moments when the frame widens and I see Christa, and the kids, and the house, and the impossible fact that I get to be here for any of this.
Somebody has to be here.
I am so grateful it is me.
I am so grateful it is us.
Christa is a rock star and an angel and the greatest partner anyone could ask for. Even that sounds too simple, almost too easy, but sometimes the truest things do. She has held the life we planned and the life we got. She has helped turn fear into logistics, logistics into rhythm, rhythm into family.
Almost a decade ago, I gave her an exit because I thought love required it.
She stayed.
Her yes stayed yes.
And then it kept going.
It kept becoming paperwork, children, laughter, rest, phone calls, second opinions, bad nights, better mornings, and the ordinary miracle of not being left alone with the worst story my mind can tell.
Everything since has been the long, living proof.
I'll never forget
Her grace, her love, her beauty
Her endless kindness
