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Laura Dorwart

"How do you bear it? That must be devastating," a colleague said. I'd mentioned that my husband is quadriplegic.

With a familiar tightness in my chest, I answer the same tired question: "It's not. We do just fine." "He lived alone long before I met him," I wanted to say, "and he's a theater professor" — and lots of things that I knew would only sound defensive.

The coworker read my near silence as an admission (of what, I'm never sure. Sexlessness? Solitude? Nights spent gripping a bottle of gin?) and said earnestly, "I'm so sorry you have to go through that every day. I can't even imagine."

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