Joyce Maynard, "The Best of Us"

“But even as his body wasted away, and his mind lost its sharpness, something about Jim had become more substantial. Something about me had changed too. I was a different person than the woman I’d been eighteen months earlier. Grief and pain had been harsh, but they had served as teachers. We had been through a conflagration, the two of us, and I would have given anything to have avoided it, but we’d emerged like two blackened vessels from the forge – our two beating hearts and our trust in each other all that remained.

“An odd irony came to me at this moment, when it seemed as if there was almost nothing left of the man I’d loved, almost nothing left of the two of us, as we’d been, or the life we’d made together: it seemed to me, as we approached the moment when everything would be over, finally, that the ordeal of the disease and the treatment – two separate kinds of hell I would wish on no living human – had turned us into two people we might never have become if the disease had spared Jim. Better ones, though only one of us would survive to benefit from this brutal education we’d received.”