Some of the most beautiful, tragic, and heartbreakingly poignant stories in the fight for marriage equality are the stories of couples who encounter illness and death.
Some of them -- like Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer of New York and John Arthur and Jim Obergefell of Ohio -- were able to hold
on just long enough to tie the knot.
Others -- like Derence Kernek and Ed Watson, Shane Bitney Crone and Tom Bridegroom, and Robert Smith and Steven
Rynes -- were parted by death before they ever had the chance.
Committed same-sex couples like these prove with their very lives why marriage equality matters and why marriage discrimination is both totally immoral and unimaginably cruel. Whether or not they were ever able to make it legal, their relationships show what real love is, what a real marriage looks like.
Another such couple is Chris MacLellan and Bernard Richard Schiffer (pictured above). They're two Fort Lauderdale men who let a pair of journalists from the South Florida Sun Sentinel document the last months of their life together -- and the particular challenges they faced as a same-sex, intergenerational couple -- as Bernard died of esophageal cancer.
The paper printed Chris and Richard's story this weekend and published an incredibly moving photo-and-story package online called "In Sickness and in Health: A Couple's Final Journey."
You simply must click through and read it. Fair warning, though: have tissues handy, because you'll need them. (In fact, their story is so powerful that I haven't even been able to bring myself to watch the video that goes along with it.)
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