It is dark. I am sleeping on a pad on the floor in a room crowded with storage boxes. The room is upstairs in a small two bedroom house. Daniel is sleeping in the room too. An owl has also been in the room with us for the last several nights. I like having the owl in the room with me but I realize that the owl has had nothing to eat. There is a pocket gopher in the room but it is a little too large for the owl, and is also probably hiding among the boxes so the owl can't find it. I need to get the owl outside so it can find something to eat.
Daniel catches the owl and give it to me. I carry it over to an open window and hold it outside the window with its wings spread. When I let go of it I expect it to fly but it instead drops straight to the ground and lands with a thud. I realize it is starving and can not fly or hunt for itself. I feel profound regret that I am the reason the owl is starving, because I kept it in the room.
I run downstairs to go outside to get the owl but I hesitate because I am only wearing my underwear and I am barefoot. There are contractors remodeling the kitchen and the light is on. When they see me they make some critical remark about my being in my underwear but I ignore them and decide to go out anyway. The front lawn is rough, as if it has been rototilled. I run around to the back of the building where I dropped the owl.
I hear a rattling sound and a scuffling in the bushes down the bank, and I see the owl trying to fly away in front of the cat. The cat emerges from the bushes with her tail puffed up, proud to have chased away the owl. Now I will never be able to catch the owl and it will almost certainly starve to death.
Falling asleep again, I wonder if what happened with the owl was real or not. I am back in the dark house and see that there are no contractors in the kitchen and all the lights are off. Now I know that it was a dream.

I'm walking up to a church which looks like the church in Jackson but is much smaller. It is also, or maybe still, dark out. I notice that the lawn in front of the church is rototilled and I realize that the church is somehow the same as the house with the owl. I walk through the front doors into a foyer barely big enough for half a dozen people to gather. A woman is serving hot chocolate at a small table on the left. I take a mug and have her fill it for me because my arms are weak.
Entering the sanctuary, which has only about eight rows of pews, I notice a handful of people sitting in a couple of the pews on the right side. Those pews have beige-colored steel panels blocking access from the central aisle. The pew behind them also has a steel panel blocking access but I slide it aside and sit down towards the far end of the pew next to Lucky M. From where we are sitting, a wall right in front of us blocks our view of the podium.

Darchelle, I love you. You have shown me love in a way that I have never seen love before.
You have listened to me,
You have seen me, you know me.
I rejoice in your delight in me.

Today, in the presence of our families and dear friends, I commit myself to you,
To love you and trust you,
To hear you and receive you,
To continue to open my heart to you.

I am yours and will be yours as long as we both have life.

Life is good. You've seen the t-shirts, a graphic of a figure swinging a golf club or relaxing in a hammock with a big smile, along with the slogan “Life is good” printed in big letters. Well, Darchelle and I are here to tell you, that's not the whole story.
Those of you who know Darchelle will have undoubtedly heard her say, “La vida es dura” or in other words, "Life is hard.” It's not just a motto. It is a philosophy born of her personal temperament and experience. And mine as well, though it had not occurred to me to express it so succinctly.
In our first run together, a 50k along the shores of West Seattle, I shared with Darchelle my struggles with God. In our second run together,on foggy forested trails around Port Orchard, we talked about sadness and anger, and Darchelle explained how anger can be an attempt to manage sadness. In our fourth run together, a 12-hour trail run in Redmond Watershed Preserve, we talked about the concept of holding another person’s pain and I told her about a millionaire friend of mine who woke up one morning with a headache, passed out from an aneurysm, and never recovered the ability to talk. We found common ground in our love of long-distance running and we connected by expressing and holding each others pain.
Now the phrase “Life is hard” is not for either of us an accurate description of our objective reality. We don't routinely go to bed hungry, unless Darchelle is in a weight-loss competition doing whatever it takes to win first prize and take home the money—which she did. We have a roof over our heads and we are surrounded not by enemies but by friends. The lives we live would be the envy of many people around the world. So how can we say, “Life is hard?”
I’ve had ALS for three years now. It has progressively destroyed the muscles and nerves in my arms and hands to the point where they are now almost useless. It is likely that over the next three years the rest of me will suffer the same fate. Five years from now I will probably be dead. ALS is incurable and almost always irreversible as well. I’m actually one of the lucky ones. If I had a typical case, I wouldn’t be here today.
Darchelle has looked for love for most of her adult life. Of course there have been suitors, but none of them knew her and loved her as she longed to be known and loved. I did, and do. In me, Darchelle's heart found home, and in Darchelle, my heart found home, too. We were both alone in our own particular way. That is different now. We can be who we are and be valued. We experience knowing deeply and delight in being known by the other. Each rejoices with the other's joy, neither competing with it nor resenting it, but celebrating with the other. Each sits with the other's pain, neither explaining it nor trying to fix it, but just offering comfort in being present. I am not alone anymore and neither is Darchelle. After 30 years, she found love and now she will lose her beloved. Life is hard.
So what do you do? Do you just give up? Do you withdraw from love because you’re faced with the prospect of loss? Do you erect a wall around your heart to keep grief out? Darchelle did not. She chose love with her eyes open. She chose to love knowing grief would follow. And her love gave me life. When I found out I had ALS I wanted to end my life. Darchelle's love gave me a compelling reason not to go down that path. We have chosen love for each other and life together despite the imminent prospect of grief and death.
That is why we have invited you here today, to help us celebrate love over loss, life over death, hope over despair. Weddings are usually forward-looking events, the celebration of the bright future ahead for the new couple. A wedding initiates a marriage born of hope, the hope that love will continue, that the couple will grow together, that they will build a life together. This wedding though is a little different, celebrating as it does a marriage which has already begun, in the face of a future darkened by disability and death. Eight months ago we married in a private ceremony, before we were fully ready to share our love with our communities. We married because we loved one another but also because our time together would be short. Today we do not initiate a future together. Today we celebrate a life together in the present, which is of course informed by both the past and the future. We celebrate a love which has proven equal to the challenges we face. In that love there is hope, there is growth, there is joy, there is life. So “La vida es dura”, life is hard. But there is love, and love is good.

I am walking along the road towards the house in Jackson from about Pittman's pasture, accompanied by several other people. We stop at the front door of each house to tap on a small panel of wood set in the center of each door. The panels consist of 5 wooden strips positioned vertically, each about an inch wide. They look old, as if weathered and repainted many times. We tap in a specific pattern, once on the outer pair, then on the inner pair then on the center strip. Our purpose is not to open the door, though the tapping may unlock it, but we are checking to see if the panels are working properly, I think. On one of the doors, with a freshly painted black panel, my tapping has no effect. I direct someone else to go up to the house before Emerson's because it is a ways off the road.
While we are in the road at the foot of the hill before Emerson's, a crazy woman comes sprinting down the hill, her legs spinning as if in a cartoon. I expect her to hit me but she misses me and crashes instead into a woman behind me, maybe Delia or Alicia, who is gracious about it. Near me I notice large sheet metal horse trailer with the top smashed in. A large black horse is trapped in the trailer and struggling to stand up but it cannot get its legs under it. The bolts which attach the top to the bottom of the trailer has been removed on one side so that the top could be peeled back to release the horse but nobody does so.
We skip Emerson's door because the house was taken down, but there is now a new inn, not open yet, along the road at the entrance to the driveway.
As we turn off onto Wilson Road I point out to Darchelle how the snow has drifted across the road and explain that the wind changes direction and blows the snow around after a storm. On Wilson Road the snow is only a few inches deep with a slight wind crust which I break as I shuffle through it.
At the house we (I think it is Daniel with me now) walk up to the corner of the porch where two people, maybe Mom and John, are sitting. They do not speak or move and appear to be covered with frost. There are large flakes of frost on the floor of the porch and I consider photographing them but decide that would be too much effort.