David McElroy

The yellowed face in the picture caught my attention when I noticed the pinkish color of the healthy hand on her forehead. And then I noticed the man’s summary of his story.

“Here she is, Teresa,” the anonymous man wrote on a social media post. “She’s the love of my life, and today is her birthday. And she’s dying.”

This is not my story. I have very little to add to it. But this couple’s story touched me. There’s nothing we can do to help them. But Teresa is dying of liver disease and he’s terrified and heartbroken. The very least we can do is listen to their story.

“She’s getting sicker every day,” the husband writes. “She gets confused from high ammonia levels. She’s yellow because her liver is failing. She’s in pain, and can’t take anything because of the bad liver.”

In the midst of their fear and pain, he recounts that he’s thankful that Teresa walked into the company where he worked around 8 a.m. on Sept. 23, 1983. He said he had to work up the courage to ask her out — and he worded the question vaguely in case she turned him down. But he had to ask her out, he said, because “I fell in love with her eyes the first time I saw her.”

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