Ellen picked up the box, studied the instructions again, mouthing the words as she read silently. She looked at her sleeping husband. His breathing was slow and deep, just as it should be.

    Any time now his body might shudder, spasm or shake. She desperately wanted to leave the bedroom, skip that part of the process and return once it was over. Instead, she reached down and placed her hand on his. It was warm.

    Fifty-six years.

    Their marriage had outlasted all three of their children’s marriages. It had been a good marriage. Jacob never strayed. Never came home drunk. Not once did he yell at her except when they both were arguing with equal fervor. He told her he loved her every day, like clockwork. 

    Then a year ago he started to forget things. Days would go by when he didn’t say a single word. But it wasn’t his silence that clued them in about his dementia. It was the day he told her “I love you” 63 times.

    Jacob fought the battle against his disease as long as he could endure the side effects of the medicine. But he was exhausted by those side effects, diminished by them. He was ready to go.

    “It’s time,” he said.

    That was last Thursday. They waited until Monday to go to the doctor’s office for the assisted suicide kit. “Soft Sleep” was what it said on the box, but neither one of them could stomach calling it that.

    “They should call it ‘time to go,’” he’d said when the doctor removed a box from the locked cabinet and set it in front of them. The doctor smiled, asked Jacob a series of questions to verify his current mental state, then lifted out of the box a small pink device that looked like a giant, gaudy upside-down ring. Jacob slid his index finger through the opening and a barely discernible red laser-light scanned and mapped his fingerprint, securing the contents of the dispenser only for him and starting a timer that would last 72 hours before rendering the chemicals inert.

    Ellen brushed her hand across a different ring, his wedding ring. It was a simple texture-less design, thinned a bit by time, but otherwise the same band of gold she’d placed on his finger all those years ago.

    Any time now.

    She had run through this part of the process a dozen times in her head. What it would be like to watch his body suddenly jerk, autonomic systems offering one final losing challenge to drugs that had already committed him to their mortal whim.

    She would miss him. Oh, she would miss him terribly. But it was his time, not hers.

    The first time she’d wondered what life would be like without Jacob, Ellen felt horribly guilty. They had been married four years. It had finally dawned on her that his way of showing love was not what she’d expected. Not what she’d longed for. Consistency. Predictability. Stability. Wonderful traits for the man who had become her good friend and, at times, her best friend.

    But she had longed for something more. For passion.

    In the 11th year of their marriage, she’d nearly ruined everything, chasing that longing with her best friend’s husband. Jacob forgave her for that. And for the brief affair she had ten years later. He told her he would never leave her, no matter what. At times his promise felt like a prison sentence, but eventually, it came to feel like love.

    Soon, though, she would have his permission to follow her passion.

    Last night he apologized again for not being the king of romance she’d once thought him to be.

    “I just didn’t know how,” he said. Then he’d squeezed her hand, kissed her softly on the forehead, and held her.

    “So now you figure it out,” Ellen had laughed into his chest. She could feel his smile rise in that moment. But the moment was cut short by another fit of coughing. Then vomiting.

    Side effects.

    They met on a Wednesday. An early fall evening. She was heading to her dorm and he was chasing an errant football that had bounced off a sundial, narrowly missing her. She’d scolded him then, but his apology was so sincere, his smile so sweet, she quickly softened her words and dropped her hands from her hips, offering him a better view of her curves, inviting him to linger just a moment more before rejoining the pick-up football game.

    From that day forward, he never left her side.

    And she wouldn’t leave his side tonight, no matter how unsettling his final breath.

    Ellen adjusted her position on the bed and smoothed her dress, remembering the first time she longed to feel Jacob’s hand against her skin. She looked up at the clock.

    Soon...

    It had been a good life. A very good life. They made a great team. She would keep thousands of wonderful memories until her last day. But she wouldn’t feel guilty about the life ahead. She was ready to live again. To make new memories. To see what passion still burned within her.

    His body began to twitch...