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It’s a brilliantly sunny day in Boothbay Harbor as I sit overlooking blue water and snow-crusted rooftops from the inn at the top of the hill where we spent the night. Yesterday, we attended a memorial service in celebration of a life, and the grieving husband’s heartfelt emotion and words still echo in my mind—a nougat of sentiment to express a marriage of 55 years and a lifetime together: “She was not only good to me, she was good for me.” His words remind me of my tenth-grade English teacher, who first impressed me with the notion of relationships that encourage us to be our best. This particular moment of enlightenment came during a phase in my life when I, an honor student and three-season athlete, was most interested in the leather-clad boys who hung on the corners rather than the jocks, who seemed immature, or the college-bound intellectuals, who seemed so lacking in adventure. Decades later, I don’t pretend to have an answer for how we go on when loved ones pass, or what it is that enables a relationship to thrive for more than 50 years, but I agree with my teacher: It is not so much what you give to each other or even how you weather the joys and disappointments of life, but rather who you become through the relationship that will define what it has meant to your life and those who love you.