CHAPTER 10

“Amazing grace.”

“If it turns out to be terminal, would you marry me?”

I don’t think it’s possible for a sentence to contain more tragedy and more love in it: eleven words that encompass the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Sitting on our big overstuffed couch, just below a framed cartoon that almost cruelly read “Game Over,” Andy asked me to be his wife.

Two days earlier, just after our trip to Wisconsin, Andy had gone to his primary-care doctor to get his cough checked out. X-rays had come back showing something in or around his lungs.

“What, uh, what does that mean?” I asked the doctor, not wanting to say the word “cancer.”

“I’m going to have you go to the hospital up the street for more detailed scans, but he may have pneumonia and it’s just some fluid around the lungs,” he reassured us.

Thank God. I had convinced myself that the news would be more serious, and sitting in our doctor’s office with Andy, I desperately wanted his guess to be right.

We immediately hopped in an Uber and rode up to Sibley, a small hospital in a sleepy neighborhood in northwest Washington. It was just a few blocks from American University, and I knew Sibley only as the place that my peers were taken to when they had too much to drink at a college party. I never imagined that it would be the scene of some of the most pivotal moments in my life.

“At least we DVR’d Big Brother tonight,” I jokingly told Andy, wanting to act—no, wanting to pretend—like everything was normal. But even with the doctor’s guess and our hope that everything was all right, my gut knew different.

After Andy finished his scans, we awaited the results in an alcove in the ER. An hour went by. Then two. Patients came in and out of the neighboring spaces. Every so often, I’d walk out into the center of the ER to ask a passing doctor or nurse how much longer things would take.

“Just a moment,” said one, an hour into the stay.

“I believe the results should be coming soon,” said another at the two-hour mark.

As day passed into night, a nurse finally came by to get Andy some water and check on us.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” he answered, his voice a bit shaky. “But I’m a cancer survivor, so I’m just a little nervous.”

“Oh, I’m sure everything will be fine. I believe the doctor should be in here shortly,” she responded warmly, while pulling Andy’s chart up on the computer. As she clicked on different pages, scrolling through, she talked with us about the weather. Then she got to one page and I saw her body language change. She stood upright and the small talk ceased. She abruptly, but calmly, excused herself.

“Let me go check on the doctor,” she said with a smile that masked something darker.

Andy didn’t notice the change in tone, but I did. I got up from my chair and walked over to the still-open computer screen. I pretended to look around the windowsill, not wanting Andy to ask what I was reading. But there it was. In the middle of a long paragraph filled with otherwise indecipherable medical terms was the news I feared.

“Masses have been found in both lungs,” it read.

I tried to hide any surprise on my face as I turned around and looked at Andy, who was reading on his phone. I took him in for the split second before he looked up. He smiled at me and I managed to smile back.

Oh my God, he’s going to die, I thought to myself, recalling the hypothetical scenario Sean had laid out to me months before.

Just then, a doctor pushed aside the curtain with two younger doctors by his side and calmly delivered the bad news. It looked like Andy’s cancer was back and that it had spread to his lungs, something that tests would confirm in the coming days.

He didn’t say anything about the prognosis and Andy didn’t ask. The conversation was focused purely on the next steps. They’d admit Andy to the hospital for the night for monitoring and to drain some of the fluid that had begun filling the cavity around his lungs, fluid that was a result of the tumors. As Andy talked with his nurses about the logistics of being admitted, I stepped out to call his mother, Ardis.

“Andy’s cancer is, um, back. It’s spread to his lungs. He’s being admitted to Sibley,” I told her, trying not to scare them beyond what I imagined they would inherently feel.

“Do you think we should come out?” she asked. She was sensitive to Andy’s wishes on the matter, and I think instinctively understood that the family flying out might spook him.

“I think it would be a good idea for you to come out,” I said. I didn’t know how much time Andy was going to have, but I wanted to make sure his family got as much time with him as possible. I also knew we were going to need help.

Time started to slow as the gravity of the situation began creeping up on me. It was like I was gradually getting the wind knocked out of me. With every passing second, the reality—that Andy was going to die—began to truly hit me. But it was still premature for me to tell her or Andy just how serious the situation was, that his cancer was almost definitely terminal. It was too soon, and it wasn’t my place. I wasn’t a medical professional, and I worried, particularly for Andy, that he would resent the person who delivered the news. I didn’t want him to hate me, and the information wouldn’t change the steps his doctors were giving him.

Still, I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. In moments like these, I’ve learned it’s always hard to know for certain what’s right and what’s wrong.

“I love you,” I told his mom as she hung up to tell her husband and call others in the family. I had never said “I love you” to his parents before, but I felt it and I knew they were going to need all the love they could get in the coming days and weeks. Nothing is more difficult than losing a child.

Then I stepped into a dark, single-stall restroom just off the center of the ER to call my own parents. As I waited for my mother to pick up the phone, I looked at myself in the mirror. Seeing my reflection made everything feel so much more real.

This is real life. This is happening.

When I heard my mother’s voice, I burst into tears.

“Mom? His cancer is back. He’s…he’s…he’s going to die!” I cried into the phone. I started hyperventilating. I could barely stand. Leaning against the sink in the dark restroom, I cried like I had never cried before. The type of crying that could burst a blood vessel. I was inconsolable.

But I needed to let it all out on the call because I had to return to Andy’s side and be calm and present. I explained to both of my parents what we’d just learned and what I already knew: He had probably a year left.

“He doesn’t know and I can’t tell him. I need you! Please come down! I need you!”

My mom was, understandably, also hysterical at the shocking news, and my dad was concerned with her driving down to D.C. in her distraught state.

“Can she come tomorrow?” he asked, going into the calm, logical attorney mode that had helped us work through intense conversations before. I wasn’t able to match his calm. I was a mess. I fell to the floor of the still-dark restroom.

“No! I need my mom! I need my mom! I need my mom! Please!”

Hearing the fear in my voice, my dad relented, and my mom bought a train ticket down for that night. With my mom on her way, I stepped out of the bathroom, cleared my eyes, and sat for a few moments to catch my breath. I walked back into Andy’s room, where the nurse was helping him into a wheelchair for the trip up a few floors to his hospital room. He grabbed my hand and I walked beside him as he was wheeled up.

“I just can’t believe I have to go through all this again. I’m exhausted and I thought I was done,” he said. “But if I beat it once, I’ll do it again.”

My heart broke, but I just let him talk. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I also didn’t want to add to his burden. He would find out in due course. I decided that my job was to provide positivity and reinforce his hope. My role was to love, not to be the realist. And after all, there are always those people who get a terminal diagnosis and end up defying the odds. Andy could be one of those survivors. Right?

It was just two days later, as Andy prepared to go with his mom to an appointment with his doctors at Johns Hopkins, that he asked me to marry him.

I had a feeling the question might come as he began to grapple with the possibility that the recurrence of the cancer was far more serious than his first go-round had been. And as the initial shock of the news wore off and he began to think about what came next, it was clear the thought of death was again on his mind. But it wasn’t until his proposal that he acknowledged the realization to me.

I worried about every word I said to him, particularly in those first days after the diagnosis. I worried that if I said yes instantly to his proposal, he would interpret that as a sign that I had already given up. But obviously, I wasn’t going to say no, either.

“Let’s see what your doctors say before we start talking about that.”

We didn’t have to wait long. A few hours after Andy and his mother left for the doctor’s appointment, I picked up my phone to a text from him: “They said it’s terminal.”

I didn’t think, I just called immediately. It wasn’t a surprise, but that didn’t diminish the shock. Even though I’d had three days to prepare for this moment, I didn’t know what to say. I told him that I was sorry. I told him that I wasn’t going anywhere, that I’d be right there with him every step of the way.

“And to the question you asked before you left,” I said, “the answer is obviously, certainly, without question, yes.”

I waited anxiously with my mom for Andy and his mom to get back to our apartment. When he walked into our living room, he appeared completely deflated. He fell into the couch and just sat there, his eyes a blank stare.

I sat down beside him and held his hand. “What did the doctors say about next steps?” I asked hesitantly.

“That I have probably ten months to a year with treatment. That I…um…will start chemo, but that it will be to prolong my life, not save…” He trailed off.

It was practically exactly what Sean had said all those months before. Staring at the ground, Andy’s eyes were filled with tears, the kind that just rest on your eyes, ready, at any moment, to burst onto your cheeks.

How do you console someone who knows that they are going to die? I couldn’t tell him that it would get better. I couldn’t tell him that he’d beat it. But I also wanted to be careful not to remove his last bit of optimism that would inevitably give him the strength to put one foot in front of the other, pursue the treatment, and grapple with the stages of acceptance and grief. I realized that I just needed to listen to him and love him.

Over the next few days, the shock subsided into crying. Lots and lots of crying. He was scared out of his mind, perpetually locked into a look of terror, the literal “fear of death” buried underneath his beautiful blue eyes.

“I’m so scared not to exist anymore,” he’d scream through the tears, his voice still muffled and impeded from the surgery almost a year before. His cries and deep breaths merged into depressing gasps. “I’m so scared, Bean. I’m so scared.”

And it wasn’t just the fear of death. He also spent those days crying about what he wouldn’t be able to do for other people: the friends he’d leave behind, the work that would remain unfinished, and the pain that he wouldn’t be able to help alleviate for others, including me.

“I’m sorry I won’t be able to be there for you, Bean,” he told me, scrunched up on our couch in the T-shirt and shorts he’d been wearing the last few days. “I’m so sad that I won’t be around to tell you that I love you, to tell you how beautiful you are, and to tell you how proud of you I am.”

I tried to stay strong in front of Andy, but I couldn’t hold it in. I couldn’t bury the emotions anymore. I felt so bad for him. And here he was, facing death, apologizing that he wouldn’t be able to be there for me.

Every passing day felt both precious and torturous. We were forced to appreciate every hour, no matter how excruciating or cruel they felt.

On August 9, ten days after the initial diagnosis, we celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday. We ordered pizza, another one of Andy’s favorites. My parents and Andy’s mom and stepdad were in town, as were Andy’s stepbrother, his wife, and their three-year-old daughter, Addison. Addy, a giggly, cherub-faced little girl, was the apple of her uncle Andy’s eye. He adored her, and as she played with her toys on the floor of our apartment, he tried to muster up his clearly decreasing emotional and physical strength to join her.

I hadn’t been away from Andy for longer than a few minutes since he had learned that the cancer was terminal. We had both effectively given up going to work, a situation more than tolerated by our flexible and generous coworkers. So, with Andy surrounded by family during my birthday “party,” I asked my parents to join me on the roof of my building for a few minutes.

“Is everything okay?” Andy asked, after I told him my parents and I were going to go up for a bit.

“Yes, yes, of course. I just want to get some fresh air,” I assured him. I could see in his eyes that he knew we were going to go upstairs to talk about him. It was obvious. What else would we be talking about?

I had to let loose, though. I needed to vent to someone. Over the last week, Andy and I had effectively been confined to our one-bedroom apartment, the two of us largely alone with the creeping darkness of death hanging over us at all times.

Sitting on the roof of my building with Washington, D.C., spread out in front of my parents and me, I hesitated to speak at first. I was worried what I was about to say would be selfish. But I needed to process my emotions with someone, and I knew my parents wouldn’t judge me for feeling sorry for myself.

“I really do always look on the bright side,” I told them, almost pleading for absolution for what I was about to say. “I try to always understand that someone has it far worse. I try to find the silver linings in any of the challenges I face. I try to remind myself that negative experiences build strength and character, but aren’t I already a good enough person?! Didn’t being trans do that? Wasn’t Andy’s cancer enough? What other life lessons do I need?! Why is this happening to me?! Why is this happening to him?! Why is this happening to us?!”

I was trying to rationalize the irrational. I shook my head and looked down, suddenly ashamed. “Every day, I wake up and it feels like a nightmare,” I confessed. “And I want this nightmare to end, but I also know what that means. The end is Andy dying, and I hate myself for feeling that.”

“I find myself feeling the same way,” my mom confided, sharing the burden of those feelings with me.

“It’s okay,” my dad said. “It’s okay. This isn’t easy. Sarah, you have had more life in the last few years than many people have in decades. And you and Andy have gone through more than most couples in a lifetime.”

I needed permission to be human. I needed to be told that it was okay to be selfish, to feel sorry for myself. No one had to tell me Andy’s plight was far worse than mine—that much was self-evident—but I did need to know that I could acknowledge and wrestle with my own emotions through it all. I just needed to hear “It’s okay to feel like this.”

Soon after we returned from the roof, Addison and her parents got ready to leave for the airport. They packed up her ladybug backpack and walked her over to her uncle Andy and me to say goodbye.

“Can you say goodbye to Sarah, Addy?” her mom prompted.

“Bye, Sarah,” she repeated in the hushed tone of a three-year-old still learning to speak.

“Can you say goodbye to Uncle Andy, Addy?” her mom added.

“Bye, Andy,” Addy whispered as they hugged.

As Addy disappeared out the door, Andy looked at me with tears filling his eyes.

“What if that’s the last time I see Addison?” he asked, overcome with the visual of the world that would continue on without him, these cruel realizations occasionally hitting him. “She’s too young. She’s going to grow up. She won’t remember me! She won’t have any memories of me!”

The simple moments of life that had felt like such triumphs in his initial recovery, and that we held so dear in the months following, now took on a morbid darkness as he struggled with the knowledge that every experience could be the last of its kind for him. That the world he knew would go on without him. That a normalcy would return for everyone but him.

Between the tears, we talked about the coming months. We talked about traveling with friends. He told me that he wanted to continue doing the work that he had been doing for so long: trying to expand health-care access for LGBTQ people. He began researching cutting-edge technologies and clinical trials that might offer some small, last bit of hope for living.

And we talked about our wedding. With the ten- to twelve-month timeline the doctors had given Andy, we tentatively planned for a fall ceremony. Both of us had always wanted a wedding as the seasons changed, and a young coworker of ours volunteered her parents’ farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, for free.

Daydreaming about it was our escape—a sunset wedding with the Blue Ridge Mountains as the backdrop, a crisp autumn evening reception under a big white tent right next to our friend’s farmhouse. We both knew it would be emotionally difficult, but the idea of ensuring a big life event—a bucket-list item—for both of us, together, was a helpful distraction.

But then, on August 14, two weeks after the initial diagnosis and exactly two years to the day after Andy sent me that first Facebook message introducing himself, a doctor delivered news that threw ice-cold water on our plans.

“You might not make it to treatment,” he said, referring to the chemotherapy that the doctors hoped would extend Andy’s life for as long as possible.

Those were the first words I heard as I walked into Andy’s hospital room. He had been admitted back into Sibley three days earlier, after his cough returned with a vengeance and his strength and energy had left him almost entirely bedridden. Since being admitted, his need for oxygen—initially a low dose through small nasal tubes—had increased dramatically.

“So you think I may only have two weeks?” Andy asked, his face completely white.

“Yes,” the doctor answered. He paused. I wasn’t quite sure where he was going next. There was silence. He seemed to be deep in concentration. I figured he was contemplating the next thing to say, since this couldn’t be a more serious conversation.

Then he said, “Hold on, there is a fly. Let me kill it.”

He slowly lifted his hands up in the air. Andy and I watched, our mouths still ajar. The silence continued, broken only by a loud clap. The body of the fly fell to the floor. “Hold on, let me pick it up.” And he slowly bent over, lifted the fly’s body, and threw it in the trash.

I wanted to scream at him, but I was too stunned by both the news and his appalling apathy toward Andy’s emotions.

After several seconds, which felt like an hour, Andy broke the silence. “Nice job.”

Finally, the doctor returned to the conversation at hand. One of Andy’s lungs was failing at a rapid rate. “You need to decide whether you want to go on a respirator. Just know, given your condition, that if you go on a respirator, you will likely never be able to be taken off of it. And to put you on a respirator, you will have to be sedated. And given your condition, you would likely never wake up.”

Oh my God.

For a few seconds it seemed like I might have to say goodbye to Andy right then and there. Forever. It sounded like the best-case scenario was that Andy would continue to physically live, but that the rest of whatever life he had left would be spent in a permanent, medically induced coma.

Moments later, another doctor came in and apologized. She had overhydrated Andy after thinking his heart was racing from dehydration. The fly-doctor seemed surprised and slightly relieved. The cardiologist prescribed some medications and reduced Andy’s fluid intake. Soon enough, Andy’s lung rebounded. By that afternoon, he was better than he had been since being admitted to Sibley three days prior.

The doctors left the room, seemingly impressed with their solution. But we were scared—and, more than anything else, confused. He was better than he had been three days before, but still incredibly weak and requiring constant oxygen. Did Andy have two weeks left or was all of this a temporary problem that was easily fixed?

“Two weeks, Bean? I’m not ready for this A Walk to Remember shit,” Andy remarked. He sounded more frustrated and exasperated than frightened.

We barraged every nurse and subsequent doctor who entered our room with questions, but no one could provide us with a clear answer.

“I don’t have a good answer,” one young doctor told us, “but I will say that you don’t look like someone with two weeks left.”

It wasn’t a ringing endorsement, but it was something to hang our hope on. Within a day or two, the consensus was that Andy had largely stabilized and that the hospital had done everything they could to remedy the situation, and the decision was made to discharge him the next day.

“Finally,” Andy said, his spirits lifted. He’d be discharged with a perpetual oxygen tank and he was still exceptionally weak, but he was coming home. He hated being in the hospital.

That night, Andy’s mom pulled me aside in the hospital waiting room. “Sarah, dear. Have you thought about moving the wedding up?”

I could tell it was more of a recommendation than a question. I had thought about asking Andy the same thing, but I knew how he would interpret the suggestion. He’d see it as a sign that he didn’t have much time left. The fact that his mother brought it up reinforced that it was probably the right thing to do. And while he had somewhat stabilized, things were still moving much faster than any of the doctors had predicted two and a half weeks earlier, when Andy first asked me to marry him. He might not have had the less than two weeks that the fly-doctor had coldly suggested, but he certainly didn’t seem like he had anywhere close to a year.

The morning of Andy’s discharge, I sat down on his hospital bed to broach the subject.

“Bean, what do you think about maybe moving up the wedding?”

“Are you giving up?” he immediately asked.

“No, no, no. I just think it’s clear that your chemotherapy will likely take more out of you than we thought, so maybe it’s best to do it before you start treatment.”

He smiled in relief. I wasn’t being entirely forthcoming, but what good would the truth do?

“I think that’s a good idea,” he said, putting his hand on my face and leaning in for a kiss.

Once we were finally situated back at our apartment, we invited our friend and colleague, Bishop Gene Robinson, over. In his mid-sixties, the bishop was a comforting figure, with gray hair and small, circular spectacles. Bishop Gene, as we all called him at the Center for American Progress, had been thrust into the spotlight when he became the first openly LGBTQ person to become a bishop in any major Christian denomination. His election in 2003 to serve as head of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire set off a frenzy, causing a worldwide schism within the Anglican Church.

When he was installed as bishop, the threats on his life were so significant and credible that he had to wear a bulletproof vest under his religious robes. Now retired from his day-to-day role in the church, Bishop Gene served as a senior fellow at CAP, working closely with the LGBTQ team, including Andy and me.

Since we first started to plan the wedding, Bishop Gene had been our dream officiate. He had become a good friend to us, and the fact that he was part of the LGBTQ community put us at ease. We recognized that as two transgender people our love seemed unorthodox to some, and we knew he would preside judgment-free.

Bishop Gene didn’t realize just how poorly Andy was doing when he first arrived at our apartment. As he walked into our living room, he looked around and took in his surroundings. He studied the knickknacks and the small toy robots that I had found so adorable when I first visited Andy at the beginning of our relationship. Two years later, those items were now joined by my decorations, framed pictures of the two of us from throughout our relationship, and lots and lots of medical equipment.

Andy was sitting on the couch with his back to the wandering Bishop Gene, looking out our large apartment windows. The sight of a thin, clear tube stretching from Andy’s nose across the floor to a large black oxygen generator made the bishop do a double take.

“Andy and I have decided to get married and we would love for you to preside,” I jumped in, trying to distract from Bishop Gene’s surprise at Andy’s diminished physical condition.

Clearly overcome with emotion at the request and the sight of Andy, Bishop Gene cleared his throat. “Ahem…I would be honored,” he replied. Just looking at Andy, he understood the urgency of the request and that any wedding would have to happen soon.

“We’re thinking about this coming Sunday on the rooftop of our building,” I told him.

“Not only would I be honored to officiate, but I would love to help organize everything,” he said. “I have a small budget for these types of things and I’d like to help pay for it, if you are comfortable.”

We hadn’t really considered buying anything for the wedding. Given that we were now talking about a ceremony in five days’ time, we figured it would be very simple. No flowers. No food. No decorations.

But Bishop Gene and, as it turned out, our friends had other plans. His generous offer stunned us. I looked at Andy and saw tears streaming down his face once again. For once they were happy tears.

“That is so thoughtful of you,” Andy responded, wiping his eyes. “Thank you. Thank you.”

My brother Sean, who had watched too many people, including young people, pass away from cancer, had told me that I should take stock in the beautiful acts of kindness that I’d begin to see. “Amazing grace,” Sean called it. “You will bear witness to acts of amazing grace.”

Bishop Gene’s offer was just one example of the grace that was filling our lives in what increasingly appeared to be Andy’s waning days. With nothing more than a color preference, Bishop Gene and an army of family and friends began organizing our wedding.

But as the wedding preparations continued, so, too, did the decline in Andy’s health. He was sleeping more and more. He was relegated, almost exclusively, to a recliner that his stepdad had purchased for him while he was in the hospital. Going to the bathroom required the help of three friends.

“One, two, three…” we’d count, as we’d lift Andy from the recliner to the wheelchair, in which he’d then be rolled to our bathroom just twenty feet away.

He stopped being able to swallow his dozens of pills, so I’d crush them up and put them in his ice cream, about the only thing he could eat. But it soon became nearly impossible to eat even that, taking four hours to eat six spoonfuls. Almost immediately it would be time for the next meal-medicine mix.

A home nurse stopped by for fifteen minutes every few days to check his vitals and his strength, but that was it. Andy’s friends, parents, and I were left to handle his care. And I became the taskmaster, a role Andy grew increasingly frustrated with as our conversations began consisting almost entirely of me nagging him to eat food.

He was scheduled to start treatment the Tuesday after our wedding, and he knew that he had to have some degree of strength to undergo the chemo. Otherwise, the doctors informed us, the treatment would do more harm than good: It would kill him.

“If you aren’t healthy enough to be home, you won’t be strong enough to undergo chemo,” Andy’s oncologist told us over the phone one day.

Andy was determined to make it to treatment, but if he didn’t eat, none of that would happen.

Sitting with a bowl of soft food in front of him, hours would go by with Andy taking only a few bites.

“Andy, I need you to eat,” I’d remind him.

He’d take another scoop and then sit staring at his food for another twenty minutes.

“If you don’t eat, I’m going to have to take you to the hospital,” I’d plead with him.

“Please don’t do that,” he’d cry.

“I don’t know what else do to, Bean, you need to eat! You need to take your medicine!”

We’d repeat this routine over and over again, each meal taking so long that it would bleed into the next. A mostly full bowl was perpetually in front of him.

When Andy wasn’t attempting to put his all into eating ice cream, he’d obsessively check his vitals with a fingertip clip that he asked us to buy for him. The small device that attached to his pointer finger measured his pulse and oxygenation level.

For people with cancer in their lungs, the oxygenation level is a key measurement. It indicates the amount of oxygen making it into the bloodstream. Measured on a scale of one to one hundred, healthy levels are in the high nineties. Fatal levels are in the sixties or seventies, but anything under ninety-five was problematic. We were told a person would likely lose consciousness somewhere in the eighties.

Each day, he watched as his oxygenation levels fluctuated between ninety-five and the low nineties. Sometimes it’d drop into the eighties and we’d have to turn up the amount of oxygen coming from the generator. Each increase would give him a little more energy, but as we approached the maximum output for the home machine, each increase also brought him closer to needing to go back to the hospital.

Our only respite from the now-constant struggle to keep him oxygenated, hydrated, and nourished was the wedding. Even with our friends handling most of the logistics, there were still small decisions for us to make. One was the song that would play after we exchanged our vows.

“Give me a thumbs-up when we get to one you want,” I told him, knowing that talking was becoming too tiresome.

One by one, I played different songs as Andy drifted in and out of sleep. No thumbs-up. But then I got to the song he had played for me in the car on our first date, the one that I had listened to every day on my way to work at the White House, the one that had played when Sean and I spoke at the Human Rights Campaign’s National Dinner just before Andy’s first surgery.

When “Safe and Sound” started playing, Andy’s eyes opened a little. He looked at me, managed a small smirk, and lifted up his thumb.

And then there were the vows. The next night, as a few of Andy’s friends hosted a “bachelor party” in our living room for him, I hid in our bedroom and reviewed the draft Bishop Gene had sent us of the Episcopal church’s wedding ceremony.

Andy’s friends were determined to give him the full wedding experience. Completely relegated to his chair, they brought some small bachelor-party decorations and played music videos on our TV. I heard a burst of laughter come from the living room as Andy’s fingertip oxygenation and pulse reader recorded an increase in his heart rate as a Beyoncé music video played on our TV.

“Someone’s excited,” a friend yelled, with Andy almost completely motionless in his recliner.

As Andy’s friends “partied” in the living room, I edited the ceremony. Line by line, I went through it with a pen. The wedding would be hard enough emotionally. So I removed any mention of “death” and replaced it with “forever and ever.” I wanted Andy to know that we’d be married long after he died.

Given his condition, I reduced the amount of lines we had to speak to three sentences:

“I do.”

“That is my solemn vow.”

And “Please accept this ring as a symbol of my abiding love.”

I also knew it would be challenging for him to remember those lines, so I wrote them out, with their cues, on a half-sheet of paper.

The next morning, as I walked out of our bedroom, the early light filled our southern-facing living room. The space was strangely peaceful. By now, Andy was sleeping straight through much of the day.

“Beanie…Beanie…” I whispered to wake him up. “Can I read you our vows?”

He nodded a few times as he attempted to sit up a little. I tried reading the entire service to him for his approval, but he fell asleep pretty quickly. So when he re-awoke, I read just what was on the cheat sheet, including the line right before he was to say “I do.” His cue was when Bishop Gene said, “Will you honor and love her forever and ever?”

After he said it was okay and began drifting off to sleep, I started walking back to our bedroom but stopped when I heard him mumbling. Thinking he needed something, I turned around, walked over to his chair, and leaned in. I couldn’t quite hear, so I leaned farther in.

“Forever and ever,” he whispered, now completely asleep. “Forever and ever, forever and ever…”

Sweet dreams, my bean, I thought. Sweet dreams.

---

I woke up the morning of Sunday, August 24, to a crisp, cloudless blue sky: Today was our wedding day. Andy’s energy and spirits had marginally improved. His oxygen thirst had stopped increasing, stabilizing at a high but manageable level. He was even eating a little bit.

As I helped him eat some breakfast ice cream, our friends started arriving with decorations. Bouquets and tablecloths sat next to his medical equipment, filling all the remaining space. By four o’clock, I was in our neighbor’s apartment getting ready. A few days earlier, I had gone out with two of my closest friends to a bridal shop just across the river in the colonial town of Alexandria, Virginia. After we explained the situation to the store owner, they agreed to fast-track alterations to any dress I picked and to have it to us in time for the Sunday wedding.

The first dress I tried on was absolutely perfect. The white lace floor-length dress with a V-shaped neckline that spread to off-the-shoulder sleeves needed very few alterations. Its low back led to a short train that spread out behind me. Now, standing in the calm of my neighbor’s apartment, taking in the dress hanging on the closet door, the moment finally sank in: I’m getting married.

The thought was interrupted by three loud knocks.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

I opened the door to see one of Andy’s best friends, Wes, out of breath and clearly shaken.

“Andy just had an episode. He started to collapse and go unconscious when he was moving from the recliner to his wheelchair. He is awake and his vitals are okay right now, but we called the police and the EMTs are on the way.”

With my hair still up, I stormed into the apartment to find Andy in his recliner with Sean and our friends encircling him. I broke through and asked if he was okay.

He looked up at me, clearly feeling guilty that he had collapsed just before the wedding. “I’m sorry, are you mad at me?”

I felt guilty that Andy would even worry about that.

“Of course not, Beanie. Of course I’m not mad at you.”

As the faint sirens approached, Sean leaned in and asked Andy a few questions to ensure he hadn’t had a stroke.

“What’s your name?”

“Andrew Cray.”

“Who is the president?”

“Barack Obama.”

“What day is it?”

His answer was a few days off, but he correctly identified it as “my wedding day.”

The EMTs eventually came into our apartment and made their way through the wedding decorations and medical equipment to Andy’s chair. They performed an EKG as they consulted with my brother, who had introduced himself as a doctor and informed them of Andy’s health situation. As they talked, Andy interrupted them.

“I’m not going to the hospital,” he declared, knowing what that would mean for our wedding and his chances at treatment.

The EMTs talked it over among themselves and with Sean, and with Andy’s vitals normal, they agreed to his request. As they left, I asked Andy if he wanted to move the wedding to the apartment or cancel it altogether. He shook his head firmly.

“No. This is happening.”

Sure enough, he rallied. With the help of three people, Andy was able to get into his blue button-up shirt and gray dress pants. Andy’s friends were concerned that his bow tie might be too tight around his neck, so they scrapped tying it, instead draping it around his collar like James Bond’s at the end of a long night. And with his oxygen tank in tow, he was wheeled up onto the roof of our building.

As Andy’s wheelchair approached the crowd of fifty friends and relatives—most of whom had no idea that, just an hour before, EMTs had been ready to take him to the hospital—the guests started to applaud. A smirk crossed Andy’s face, much of it covered by large, dark Ray-Bans. He lifted his fist in triumph. It was clear to everyone, including Andy, that it was a miracle that he’d made it up to that roof.

The wedding was filled with our families and the friends who had helped Andy through his first and now second round of cancer. At the front were our parents and siblings, and Andy’s aunts and uncles. Two of our best friends—Kelsey, who had come out and transitioned alongside Andy in college, and Helen, my friend since middle school who had first helped me along my own journey to coming out—were prepared to read from scripture and a poem.

“Are you ready?” I asked my dad.

He stuck out his arm, ready to walk me down the aisle. I looped my arm through his and we made our way out to the roof.

In the weeks and months after I first came out, I worried that my parents would never truly see me as me. That they’d always love me as who they used to think I was, instead of who I am. But walking out on that roof with my dad, I knew they loved me as their daughter. I knew they loved me as Sarah. And in many ways, Andy’s love for me helped them get there. Seeing someone love me as the woman I am provided my parents a path to do the same.

As I approached the crowd, I began to see the wedding that Bishop Gene and our friends had planned in less than a week. And it was perfect. The bouquets included some of my favorite flowers, purple orchids and blue hydrangeas. There were tables covered in purple tablecloths filled with food and desserts, including a small wedding cake topped with two robots holding hands.

Amazing grace, I thought.

I had always dreamed of a day like this: a beautiful wedding with a beautiful dress, marrying a wonderful person who loved me as me. I didn’t anticipate it so soon. I certainly never anticipated it under these circumstances. But it was happening. Andy and I were both fulfilling a dream, however bittersweet the circumstances.

Passing through the crowd, we turned to walk down the short makeshift aisle, which led to a beautiful open white-topped tent about ten feet wide, reminding me of a chuppah. Flowers and ferns filled the inside. At the center sat Andy in his wheelchair, and beside him was Bishop Gene, smiling in his white, red, and gold wedding vestments. Behind them, the magnificent view of Washington, D.C.—the trees in the park just beside our building that gave way to views of the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and in the distance, the Jefferson Memorial.

My dad kissed my cheek and joined my mother in the row of chairs that circled the white tent. I stepped in front of Andy, who, shrunken in his wheelchair and with sunglasses on, almost looked like he was sleeping.

He clearly wasn’t. He looked up at me, managed a smile, and mouthed the word “beautiful.”

Andy was frail, but on that beautiful August day, with Bishop Gene presiding, we made it up to our rooftop to marry each other.

My mom always said that it was clear that Andy loved me from the first time he saw me at the White House Pride Reception two years before. I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that Andy and I were committed to each other for life long before our wedding day that August. The ceremony merely formalized, before our family and by the state, what was already a reality between us. The vows we were about to take represented our transformational, transcending love. We had been through so much together already, having come into each other’s lives at just the right time. He had helped walk me into my own authentic life and trans identity. And now I was there to help walk him to his death. Standing there, I knew that nothing in my life would ever be more important than what I was about to do.

“Andy and Sarah,” Bishop Gene began, “you come before God to make public your commitment to one another and to ask God’s blessing.”

He turned to Andy, who tilted his head ever so slightly up to me as Bishop Gene continued. “Andy, do you freely and unreservedly offer yourself to Sarah? Do you commit yourself to love her with all of your heart? Say ‘I do.’ ”

“I. DO,” Andy responded breathlessly, the energy and difficulty of the sentence clear.

Bishop Gene asked the same of me.

“I do,” I said directly to Andy.

The wind swept through the assembled crowd, rustling the flowers and carrying with it the sniffles of our friends and family.

“Sarah, in the name of God, do you give yourself to Andy? Will you support and care for him, enduring all things, carrying all things? Will you hold and cherish him in times of plenty and in times of want? Will you honor and love him forever and ever? Is this your solemn vow?”

“That is my solemn vow,” I responded.

“Andy,” he continued, “in the name of God, do you give yourself to Sarah? Will you support and care for her, enduring all things, carrying all things? Will you hold and cherish her in times of plenty and in times of want? Will you honor and love her forever and ever? Is this your solemn vow?”

“Th…” Andy paused. He couldn’t say the full sentence. “Yes,” he pushed out.

Sean and Kelsey stepped up from their chairs, bringing the two simple silver wedding bands Andy’s mother had bought last-minute at a pawn shop in D.C. Bishop Gene blessed the two rings and then picked up Andy’s hand. I bent forward, taking Andy’s hand from Bishop Gene’s.

“Andrew, please receive this ring as a symbol of my abiding love.”

I pushed the band onto his frail finger.

Bishop Gene then handed Andy the ring he would put onto my hand. I extended my arm. Andy gently held my hand with his left hand as he slowly pushed the band onto my ring finger with his right.

“Sarah.” He gasped for breath. “Please do the same.”

With outstretched arms, we held on to each other as Bishop Gene proclaimed, “And as much as Andy and Sarah have exchanged vows of love and fidelity in the presence of God and family, I now pronounce them bound to one another in the holy covenant of marriage as husband and wife. Now and forever.”

A smile crossed Andy’s face. Holding my hand, he looked up from his wheelchair and softly whispered, “I love you.”

The drums of “Safe and Sound” cued. And as the song from our first date played, my heart swelled, and I leaned in to kiss my husband.