She stirs awake before the alarm sounds, even before the choir of song birds welcomes the day from their crooked perches on the 100-year-old black oak.  Yawning and brushing away the sleep from her eyes, she turns to listen to him.

His breaths are deep and measured. She is grateful that the congestion from this latest round of pneumonia seems to have passed. The hacking coughs that rattle his bones and rob his much-needed rest are absent now.

Still, last night’s sleep came to him in fits and starts. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he always says.

This time, the culprits were cramps that seized his feet and hands. He had tried to get out of bed without waking her. He often mused that she slumbered with one eye open. He never could sneak so much as a cookie into bed without a comment from the peanut gallery.

When he got up, he urged her to go back to sleep and awkwardly stumbled out of the bedroom, fighting hard to stretch his toes and arches and aching calves before the pain would have him writhing on the floor.

He walked around the house from 1:42 a.m. until 2:26 a.m., trying to coax his traitorous muscles back into the fold.

She knows this because she watched the clock.

When he crawled back into bed, she didn’t speak because it upsets him to think that she worries about him day and night.  He loves her for it, but he feels guilty that his illness consumes her in so many ways.

He did all that he could to silence the moan as his body sunk into the mattress.  While waiting to drift off, he listened closely to her breaths. He prayed that precious sleep would soon embrace them both.

Content that he is finally resting comfortably, she quietly climbs out of bed, puts on her robe to fight off the winter chill in the drafty old house, and pads down the hall, followed by their ever faithful, but still droopy-eyed dogs.

It isn’t quite time to get the children up for school, but she can’t resist peeking in on them. Unlike her, the kids can sleep through an earthquake, not to mention their alarm clocks. Must be nice.

This is as calm as their household ever gets, she smiles.  Her babies look like sleeping angels. Sure she’s biased, but that doesn’t change the facts, does it?

It hits her that they’re not exactly babies anymore.  At sixteen and nine, they are dynamos: full of life, fun and funny, stubborn, driven, curious, silly, sugar and spice, and a few puppy dogs’ tails thrown in for good measure. The boys are starting to call for the oldest one. Where did the time go? They’re both growing up way too fast.

She makes her way into the kitchen and puts on the coffee. Steaming cup in hand, she looks through the picture window toward the Ozarks hills and for some reason begins to reminisce about her family’s journey leading to this auspicious day.

They were both working musicians when they met in Virginia 30 years ago. They became friends in their 20s, went on one date, and then she moved away.  When she came back several years later with a teacher’s degree in hand, they began spending more and more time together. Friendship turned into love, and the 30-somethings married in front of an overjoyed, and quite-relieved, gathering of family and friends.

Six years later, they traveled to exotic mainland China and adopted a beautiful one-year-old girl who had been abandoned on the steps of a Buddhist temple and then taken to an orphanage. Seven years after that, they went back to China with their now eight-year-old in tow, and adopted a two-year-old little sister who had been abandoned in a courtyard of a busy city factory.

Such is one of the mysterious lessons of life. From great adversity often springs great blessing.

When he became gravely ill with multiple myeloma a few years later, it was hard for her to see any potential blessings. She remembered thinking, “Why is this happening? It’s not fair.” In truth, she was afraid that they were going to lose him.

Once they recovered from the initial shock of the diagnosis, she said something that stirred his soul:

”There is no way that those girls are going to be abandoned again. We will get through this together, no matter what happens. We will be brave, and we will be faithful, and we will lean on each other and love each other.”

Those words bolstered them through the difficult times ahead.

They decided to seek treatment far away from home. It was important to keep the girls’ lives as normal as possible. She would continue to teach; the kids would stay in school and be around their friends and all things familiar.  She would travel to be with him when she could.

They sat down with their daughters and carefully explained that daddy was ill and had to move away for awhile to get better. They’d be able to see each other sometimes, but they could talk on the phone every day. The oldest promised to take care of mommy and her sister; the youngest said that she would miss her daddy and would be good.

It was hard on her to manage their home life, to cradle the kids, to keep teaching, to stay in her last year of graduate school, all the while wanting to be by his side through every moment of the chemotherapy and stem cell transplants and surgeries.

Brothers and sisters and friends came from all around the country to care for him when she couldn’t be there.  They both cried the first day she had to leave him.

This morning’s tears are happy. Today marks his last day of chemotherapy after four years of treatment.  He is doing well.  She’ll let him sleep in.

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Editor’s Note: As most of our readers who regularly read Sean’s column probably know, Sean typically writes his columns from his own personal perspective. For this particular edition of his column, however, he has chosen to step back and write about his family’s story from a somewhat different perspective.