One year ago today I watched my wife—my partner of 26 years—die in a hospice bed. Just forty minutes earlier, the hospice nurse had felt Jill’s swollen fingers and announced that “her time is near” and predicted she’d be gone within an hour or two. This announcement stunned me. Though Jill seemed to be sleeping, she was apparently unconscious. I had expected her to be weeks in hospice. This was only her second day. The hospice PA administered morphine, then he, the nurse, and the floor supervisor left me alone with Jill.

Jill’s last several weeks had been a horror show because, unbeknownst to either of us, she had fallen into a psychotic spiral, brought on by a UTI and/or cancer in her brain. Did you know that for persons over the age of 65, a UTI can be life-threatening? You’ll show all the signs of schizophrenia. I’d had to call the EMTs to the house twice to get Jill—in delirium–off the floor and to the ER for treatment. It took three weeks before one of the hospitals determined her spells were induced by a UTI. I’d never heard of such a thing.

During those final weeks at home, I couldn’t be with her every moment. When I’d return to her, she’d have on her lap a pile of notes she’d written to herself, desperate to communicate something—an urgent message–but nothing she wrote made any sense. She knew her mind was on fire but she could do nothing about it. I don’t know if she was hallucinating or making phone calls to random people to ask for help or whatever. She was a stranger in a strange land. Heartbreaking. It would have been nice to hold her hand and reminisce about better days. But that’s not how it went.

When we’d bought the farm ten years ago, in 2015, my intention was to write a book about our adventures, just the way I’d written a book about our reclaiming a ruined frat house in the city. Over the years, I took copious notes about farm life. It had to be a funny story, I thought.

There was plenty to laugh about, like the night we were frightened by screaming from one of our fields, only to learn that it was a vixen’s mating call. What did we know of wildlife? Or the time Jill harvested black walnuts with the intention to shell and sell them—”A delicacy!” she exclaimed, only to learn that they were nearly impossible to shell and left her hands blackened with walnut dye for nearly three weeks. Or the morning a big-chested tom turkey sauntered down our drive as if he owned the place (following the path trod by generations of his ancestors?). Or the time the sewer pipe froze and burst under the barn apartment and I spent the day cutting down four-foot stalactites of sh*t and hauling them to the nearby field.

But then, five years in, Jill was diagnosed with terminal, metastatic breast cancer and our story changed in ways I couldn’t control. Was there still an adventure here? Everybody wants a happy ending. That was the plan: Jill and Ron prevail again, bringing back an historic old farm to its Victorian glory!

I’ve been told that the hospice people should not have left me alone with Jill—because the ending isn’t always quiet. Jill’s was not. Although she was unconscious, her body struggled. All I could do was watch in horror, unable to leave her because I knew this was the end. Later, it took me months of therapy to find a place to put those final moments. I’m still processing them.

Don’t worry: I’m okay now. We humans are hard-wired to heal. More than anything, Jill wanted that for me: a safe landing. She’d have appreciated the many projects I have completed on this old farm since her departure. As with our frat-house adventure, when we flirted with bankruptcy and encountered setback after setback–“This place is a money pit!”–Jill had expressed grave doubts about our prospects for success. But, again and again, I reminded her that we would make it happen. And we did. In the end, she saw that, in spite of her regret for leaving early, this was another dream come true.