Prologue

For over fifteen years, I was privileged to be married to a hero. Not the sort of hero that populates the comic books I love, not the sort of hero who wears spandex and masks and battles evil, but a more everyday kind of hero-- a devoted father and husband with an ordinary, boring desk job. My hero battled cancer twice before he was forty, with courage and humor and remarkably few tears.

While he was fighting his last battle, I told him, as I'd told him many times before, that he was my hero.

"Some hero," he said with disgust. "I'm going to lose this thing, you know."

"Heroes don't win every battle," I told him. "That doesn't mean they aren't heroes."

He was right-- he lost the battle. But in my eyes, he was still my hero.

This is his story.