She Was My World, but We Couldn’t Marry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here author Ari Diaconis chooses NOT to marry Dunia Rkein due to his illness, uncertain survival prospect, and not wanting to burden her with his long-term care (if he survived)
Compare to Feynman, who married Arline Greenbaum despite the fact that she had severe tuberculosis and only a slim chance to survive.
Similar, but different. (Of course)
I wonder, is it better to never marry, or to lose the spouse shortly afterward? Is it easier or harder depending on the gender of the survivor (in our era, not the 1940s)?
If you love someone and they're dying, being married to them especially in the 40s makes things a lot easier for handling their affairs both before and after they die.
There's so many laws even now that aren't fixed to handle when people aren't married.
But it haunts me in every relationship I have, even if it's irrational.
Life is short.
> We would be married but for my condition, which has placed a question mark at the end of nearly everything. Will experimental treatments eventually fix me? Can I contribute to a family? Is it fair to ask that Dunia sustain a lifetime of my poor health?
I don't know Ari's situation, but I can guess because I'm living through something similar. When he states that "we can't marry", I'm guessing he came to that conclusion after looking at the full bill.
When you go from being a person's partner to being a dependent, when you lose all sources of income (don't count on that social safety net), when you can do few to no fun things together anymore, it doesn't feel like much of a choice anymore.
It takes a special type of person to marry into that. And if you do marry, you need to live with the guilt of imprisoning them forever too. This kind of thing is not a spectator sport. Everyone participates, and suffers. That's "choice".
I know a distant relative in the Midwest who's wife had a stroke. After about a year they made the difficult decision to get divorced because the aftercare was ruining them financially (she couldn't live at home). By divorcing, she became eligible for federal assistance, allowing her husband to keep a house over their children's heads.
This is the reality of healthcare in the US.