“Please take care of Carmen,” Mom said to my partner, Joe, between coughs and gasps from her hospital bed one rainy Sunday afternoon in April 2019. I assumed she was referring to that night, as I’d been dealing with increasing bouts of insomnia while I realized how dire her stage 4 lung cancer had become. But when she died hours later, I understood that she had wanted Joe to “take care” of me for life, inadvertently tethering me to him until death do us part. In the immediate aftermath of her...