I married a dying man to honor his final wish. Ten days later, Carl was gone.<\/p>\n
We had met through a hospice program where I volunteered. He had stage-four cancer, lived alone, loved books, and always wanted to play Scrabble. After four months, he surprised me by asking me to marry him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just don\u2019t want my last chapter to end alone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
I agreed.<\/p>\n
Ten days after our wedding, Carl died holding my hand.<\/p>\n
That evening, his lawyer came to my door carrying a letter Carl had forbidden him to give me while he was alive.<\/p>\n
The first sentence shattered me:<\/p>\n
\u201cOur meeting was not an accident.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carl revealed that we had known each other as teenagers. He had lived two houses away from me before my parents died and I entered foster care.<\/p>\n
I barely remembered him.<\/p>\n
But he remembered one afternoon when his stutter embarrassed him and I distracted him with a ridiculous story until he smiled again.<\/p>\n
For years afterward, Carl wrote one wish for me every birthday in a private journal.<\/p>\n
After his cancer diagnosis, he discovered my name on the hospice volunteer list and requested me specifically.<\/p>\n
He never told me our history because he feared I would marry him out of guilt.<\/p>\n
His final journal entry, written after our wedding, contained just two words:<\/p>\n
\u201cShe remembered kindness.\u201d<\/p>\n
I hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
But Carl had carried it his entire life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I married a dying man to honor his final wish. Ten days later, Carl was gone. We had met through a hospice program where I volunteered. He had stage-four cancer, lived alone, loved books, and always wanted to play Scrabble. After four months, he surprised me by asking me to marry him. \u201cI just don\u2019t …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9365,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9363\/revisions\/9365"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}