Part Two of Deux
My darling Lizzy,
Papa wrote about soulmates long before I ever knew your mummy existed. I wrote about destiny. About waiting. About believing there was someone out there who believed in love the way I did. I had no idea then that all those words were leading me toward her — and eventually toward YOU. It’s August as I write this, the same month papa met mummy in 2018, and the same month, three years later, we stood in a church and made it forever. I had g-tube surgery last month, and recovery has been slow, harder than I expected. Writing this post is part of how I’m getting my voice back. Meanwhile you are doing the opposite of slowing down — crawling so fast we can barely keep up, standing tall, so, so, SO ready to walk, ready to run, girl. Right now, mummy is beside me, like she always is, and you are somewhere close by filling this home with a kind of joy I did not know existed. Today I understand something my younger self could only imagine: finding your soulmate is not the end of a love story. It is the beginning of learning how to love someone through EVERYTHING. Someday, if you are blessed to find that person, don’t search for perfection. Find the person you can choose, and who chooses you, again and again and again. I love you my beautiful girl!
Originally written on August 13, 2026 Chicago, Illinois
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A few days ago I listened to Jay Shetty’s episode “Ready to Find Love? Start with These 5 Shifts,” which is admittedly a funny thing for a 55-year-old married man to be doing. I FOUND HER. 😂❤️ But something he said made me think about the man writing this blog more than a decade ago — a hopelessly romantic guy wandering around San Francisco, living those days in Sausalito, with Taylor, convinced somewhere in this enormous world was one woman I was supposed to find.
Jay’s premise was much less romantic than mine. Love, he said, is partly about probability — self-acceptance instead of pretending, respecting how someone else experiences love instead of demanding a copy of yourself, unlearning old wounds instead of falling for potential over reality, and building a life so full it naturally invites love in rather than chasing it down.
Probability. That word sounds terribly unromantic. I preferred DESTINY. Still do. But maybe they aren’t opposites. Maybe probability is simply one of the tools destiny uses.
I went back and searched my own blog for one word: Soulmate. Five posts appeared, and I smiled — apparently Cecil circa 2013 and 2014 had a lot to say about a woman he had never met. In one post, I’d already figured out that my soulmate would be someone who believed in love the way I did. That stopped me, because I know her now. Her name is Grace. ❤️
There was another post, And Then I Saw Her Face…, where someone had given me advice that stayed with me: if I hadn’t met my soulmate yet, don’t press — in due course, she’d be there.
In due course. Four years later, August 3, 2018, I walked into Nellcote in Chicago, and there she was. She didn’t walk through the door surrounded by angels. There was no booming voice from heaven telling me this was the one — would’ve saved me some anxiety. Instead there was a woman, a conversation, a connection, another date, another conversation, another choice. Then another. And another. And another.
What am I saying? There were trumpets blaring full orchestra playing police sirens fire truck honking and someone had just knocked it out of the park.
We had our civil ceremony that next August of 2019. Two years later, August 28, 2021, we stood in a church and did it again — this time in front of God and everyone we loved. Then came:
Italy
Netherlands
France
England
Costa Rica
Spain
Germany
Austria
IVF.
India.
Heartbreak.
Hope.
Prayer.
Pregnancy.
ALS.
A wheelchair.
A ventilator.
A feeding tube.
Caregivers.
Sleepless nights.
Fear.
And then — Lizzy. Our miracle. Our little girl.
When I was younger, I thought finding your soulmate meant finding the person with whom you’d experience life’s greatest adventures. I wasn’t entirely wrong — Grace and I traveled, we laughed, we ate (good LORD did we eat 😂), we built traditions, we dreamed. I loved making her chai in the morning and warming her paratha. I loved taking care of her, giving her things, planning surprises, being her husband. But I didn’t understand the question completely. The question isn’t only who do you want beside you when life is beautiful. The harder question is who remains beside you when life becomes almost unbearably hard. And perhaps harder still — who are YOU when life becomes unbearably hard for the person you love?
“Two are better than one… though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12)
ALS answered that question for us in a way I never asked it to. There are things Grace does for me now that neither of us could have imagined when we met. There are things I can no longer do for her that once defined how I expressed love. I cannot make her chai. I cannot warm her paratha. I cannot drive her somewhere. I cannot wrap my arms around her when she is exhausted. I cannot pick up Lizzy and tell Grace, “Go sleep. I’ve got her.” There are days when my wife is wife, mummy, nurse, advocate, caregiver, organizer, protector, and everything in between. And there are moments when I look at her and wonder how I possibly got so lucky — and moments when I look at her and feel guilty. That is the ugly part. The part romantic stories usually leave out. Because when the person you love is carrying so much because of YOUR disease, love doesn’t always feel warm and beautiful. Sometimes love hurts. Sometimes love is a terrible fight at 10 pm that should have never happened where both are right both are wrong. Sometimes love is watching the person you would do anything for suffer because you cannot do anything. At least not the things you once could.
This disease has forced me to redefine love. I used to think it lived in trips and jewelry and gifts and grand gestures. I know better now. Love lives in the quiet things. Love lives in sacrifice. Love lives in allowing someone else to help me so Grace can rest. Love lives in humility. Love lives in choosing the other person when circumstances give you every excuse to retreat into yourself. Some might call that bearing one another’s burdens. I call it the only kind of love worth having.
And THAT is where my younger self got something profoundly right. I wasn’t searching merely for someone beautiful, or funny, or smart, or successful. I was searching for someone who believed in love the way I did. I just didn’t yet understand what believing in love would eventually require.
Grace does. She believes when it is romantic. She believes when it is inconvenient. She believes when it is exhausting. She believes when we’re laughing and when we’re crying. She believes when I’m strong and when I cannot move anything below my neck. She believes when I am afraid. She believes when I BELIEVE. She believes when believing is fucking hard.
That is my soulmate. Not because some cosmic force guaranteed we’d never suffer. Not because we somehow fit perfectly together. Not because marriage magically turned two imperfect human beings into one perfect love story. But because eight years after walking into each other’s lives, through circumstances neither of us could possibly have imagined, we are still here. Still choosing. Still loving. Still praying. Still fighting. Together.
Maybe Jay is right — maybe love begins with probability. You leave the house. You say yes. You meet someone new. You allow yourself to be surprised. One choice creates another choice which creates another until someday you look backward and see a path that couldn’t possibly have been visible when you started walking it. But I still believe in destiny too. I HAVE TO. Because when I look backward through my life, I see threads — Chicago, San Francisco, Taylor, India, writing, heartbreak, friendships, a thousand seemingly unrelated choices. Then Nellcote. Then Grace. Then marriage — twice. Then our impossible journey to becoming parents. Then Lizzy. I cannot look at all of that and see randomness. I see God. I see His fingerprints everywhere. I see prayers I didn’t realize I was praying being answered years later.
I want to reach backward through time, put my arm around that young man writing into the universe about a woman who believed in love the way he did, and tell him: don’t press. Keep living. Keep loving. Keep putting yourself out there. Keep believing. She’s coming. You’re going to wait longer than you want. You’re going to get hurt. You’re going to wonder if you were foolish for believing so deeply in something you couldn’t see. Believe anyway. Because in due course — she’ll be there. And brother, you have no idea how much you’re going to need her, or how much you’re going to love her, or that one day, years later, your body will be failing you and you’ll be sitting beside the woman you once dreamed existed while your baby girl is somewhere nearby. And you’ll finally understand: a soulmate isn’t simply the person you were destined to find. A soulmate is the person with whom you keep choosing to fulfill that destiny. Over. And over. And over again.
“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)” — e.e. cummings
Grace — I searched for you before I knew your name. I wrote about you before I knew your face. I believed in you before I knew you existed. And after everything we have lived — after everything we are living RIGHT NOW — I would still search every city. Walk every road. Make every mistake. Endure every heartbreak. And live every single moment again if somewhere at the end of it I knew I would find you.
In due course. There you were. My soulmate. My wife. My home. I would choose you again.❤️
GO ADVENTURE ◆ GO TRAVEL ◆ GO LIVE
ALWAYS BE EPIC
Secret of My SucCecil 