I am not good enough for him, and I don’t say this fishing to be convinced otherwise. It’s the plain truth.

He is a living Old Spice commercial, all impeccable goodness. He kills bugs on-demand and airplanes our son until his legs ache and smells like woodsmoke and knows how to whistle grass and stays out until he collapses building rock walls, restoring clapboard, painting, pruning the roses, refinishing the tiller of a neighbour’s sailboat.

He takes Evan down to the shore for a paddle, sheparding a contrary two-year-old with a 17-foot long canoe on his shoulders. A canoe that he stripped and rebuilt, stretching new canvas over the vintage frame and rubbing it with his palms until it shone. I like that it’s got my skin in it, he says. That I made it like that with my own hands, that it gave me calluses, like a sculpture.

He passes me in the kitchen, suspiciously silent at my back as I chop and simmer. "Hey there, little lady," he says. I turn around and he sports an ear-to-ear grin, hands on his hips. A zucchini is zipped perpendicular into the fly of his pants.

This ten-year-old joke never fails, even though he’s far from the first man to do it. With a carrot. Or a parsnip. Or a Japanese eggplant, best accompanied with an interpretive dance.

This is Justin. The most annoying thing about him: his incessant perfection. Those of you who know him in real-life know exactly what I mean.

Meanwhile, I have a waterbed belly and don’t eat my crusts and look and behave like this in the morning:

How is he doing, you ask? He is still himself. That I mention him rarely here doesn’t reflect the indescribable gorgeousness that is him as my babies' dada. He was born in the wrong era, and thinks computers not much good for anything but wasting time and mooring dinghys.

All this ticky-tapping, you, these never-met friends, unnerve him a bit. It was foreign to him before, but he smiled at it. But now that I’m writing through such potent trauma I’m taking liberties, sharing our intimate life. I’ve kept him under this radar a little, not wanting him to feel any more spotlit than he already does.

He is steady and unfailing, as he has always been. He is my better three-quarters.

Next week we go to rest our son, our Liam, among a watery everglade that is heaven to us both. Just the two of us in the mist at sunrise, in the canoe. I dread it, fear accidentally seeing what’s inside the urn. I don’t feel strong enough to live through that moment without falling into pieces, throwing myself into the depths after him.

You can close your eyes, he says, holding my hand. I’ll do it for both of us.

He is my love. That’s all.