Alice Munro

"Nina had made inquiries about a wheelchair. He had not opposed this. They no longer talked about what they called the Big Shutdown. She had even wondered if they--or he--might be entering a phase she had read about, a change that came on people sometimes in the middle of a fatal illness. A measure of optimism struggling to the fore, not because it was warranted, but because the whole experience had become a reality and not an abstraction, the ways of coping had become permanent, not a nuisance.

The end is not yet. Live for the present. Seize the day.

That kind of development seemed out of character for Lewis. Nina would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception. But she could never have imagined him overtaken by physical collapse, either. And now that one unlikely thing had happened, couldn't others? Was it not possible that the changes that happened with other people might occur with him too? The secret hopes, the turning aside, the sly bargains?"

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro
Vintage, London, 2002
Page 124