Eventually, love won out over both the age difference and my fears. My husband, after all, had been 16 years my senior, and that hadn t bothered me. More important was Mike s solemn vow that he would take care of himself, and do everything possible to safeguard his health. A few weeks after I returned from Africa, we arranged to meet for the first time at a science fiction convention in Philadelphia. Four months after that, I put the farm on the market and moved to New Jersey.
Diabetes isn t always at the center of life, but it s never far away.
A naturally upbeat person, he accepts the physical ravages of the disease with far more grace than I could ever manage. He had been completely honest about his medical situation not that it would have been easy to hide. There were way too many pills for that. Despite his increasing reliance on bottled elixirs, Mike didn t act sick and didn t feel sick. Impending kidney failure doesn t announce itself in any dramatic way.