Once there was a man named Jason and a woman named Colleen. They both lived in a mental health facility.

The reason that Jason was at the mental health facility is that he had been in a car accident when he was nineteen years old and suffered enough brain damage to put him into a coma for several weeks. The parts of his brain that were most damaged were the parts that affected one's ability to concentrate, make plans and decisions, and motor coordination (he had very poor balance, and fell often). Before his accident, Jason had also had a brief history of delusions and hallucinations when he was eight years old, and his neurological impairments didn't help that any. The main reason he was at that particular mental health facility was because his impairments left him prone to loud and occasionally violent outbursts when things didn't go his way. People liked him, though, because he had a great sense of humor and a pretty good attitude towards his disabilities.

Colleen had Huntington's disease. It's genetic; if one of your parent's had it, you have a 50/50 chance of getting it yourself. You either have the gene or you don't; there's nothing you can do about it. You don't typically start showing symptoms of the disease until you're in your twenties to forties, so many people already have families of their own by the time they're diagnosed. Formerly called Huntington's chorea, Huntington's disease is a degenerative condition when brain cells start dying off in a specific part of the brain, the part that affects one's ability to control one's thoughts, emotions, and movements. Signals that the brain sends out are always getting "garbled", so people affected by it have trouble thinking, and most of the time suffer from uncontrollable muscle spasms which can get very severe.

In Colleen's case, much of the cognitive deficits typical of the disease didn't come to her till very late in its cycle (people typically die about twenty years after they start showing symptoms. It's never pleasant). Fortunate enough to have her thought process perfectly intact to better appreciate the gruesome effects laid upon her, Colleen's disease rather went after her ability to cope with her emotions and her ability to walk and do things by herself. Because of this, she was confined to a wheelchair and was known to have extremely long, violent, self-destructive behavioral outbursts when she became upset. Due to her physical condition, she was upset very often.

When they met at the mental health facility, Colleen and Jason were both thirty-four years old. Jason approached Colleen first, and soon they were sitting together, holding hands, talking together for hours at a time. They fell in love. They were both under conservatorship, and so the facility did its best to keep them from having sex, but of course they got away with as much as they could under such rigid supervision.

Jason now had something to do with his time, something to structure his day around, which was good because this was something Jason had a very difficult time doing. Colleen, who had been spending most of her time in bed because her muscle spasms were more controlled there, now had cause to be up and active during the day. They were good for each other, despite the fact that Jason was fiercely protective of her, and got into a few fights with other residents defending her, and despite the fact that Colleen was very jealous of him, and had occasional outbursts whenever she thought he was flirting with another woman. It was actually the most successful relationship either of them had ever been in, in or out of an institution.

Then one day Colleen's condition took a turn for the worse. Her speech suddenly became much harder to understand, and she began having far more physical and behavioral problems than she was before. Her wheelchair was taken away, and she was put in a geri-chair (picture a big padded throne with wheels that you can't propel by yourself) with a restraint so that she was unable to stand or transfer without staff assistance. She shortly thereafter declined so far that she was effectively unable to feed or dress herself. Her appetite declined also, and she lost a lot of weight because staff were unable to get her to eat. Jason helped a little with this, sometimes persuading her to eat even though she didn't want to.

What happened next was inevitable. Colleen was transferred to a different wing in the facility that was better suited to her increased needs, which meant that she and Jason could no longer spend time together whenever they wanted. They saw each other once a day, because the facility made sure that they ate lunch together in order to keep Colleen from becoming depressed, and for a while it worked. But then Colleen gave up. They all do eventually. She couldn't be blamed; her swallowing ability had declined so far that her meals now had to be pureed and her liquids thickened to prevent them from going into her lungs. She very strongly refused to eat anymore, or even to get out of bed. Jason did not know what was happening, why Colleen was no longer coming down to eat lunch with him. He thought she was mad at him, that it was something he had done. It was not until Colleen was transferred to a different skilled nursing facility, where they could do tube feedings, that he was told. For the remainder of his long life, and the remainder of her short one, not a day went by when they did not think of each other. When she died, three years after their having met, Jason was allowed to go to her funeral, where he met Colleen's three children for the first time.

"I've heard so much about you," he told them.