“There is a void,” Burstein writes.
“Where once there was sunlight.
There is a void.
Credit: Paul Marotta/Getty Images
Where once there was a marriage.
There is a void.
And I can’t seem to cross over the darkness.
I want to step over it, leap over it.
I feel she wants me to.
But I’m not prepared, I’m not equipped.
It seems impossible.”
“When we first started dating people would say to me, ‘YOU’RE dating Rebecca Luker?’
" he now writes.
“I knew what they meant, even if it stung.
That’s exactly how it felt,” he recalls.
“I know of no other singer who’s had that same effect on me.
It made you understand why poets wrote about purity and beauty.
It was simply that obvious.
They discovered Luker’s condition after she tripped running for the bus.
Her foot and ankle kept getting worse and spinal stenosis surgery didn’t fix it.
Her doctor told her after that ALS was a possibility.
She’d been in such denial until then,” according to Burstein.
She told him, ‘If I don’t have my voice, I don’t know who I am.
My voice is everything I am.
I’ll take my chances.’
I broke down sobbing next to her when she said that.
I’ve never witnessed anything so brave in my life.”
ALS eventually took her voice.
I know she did.
Her eyes focused directly on me.
“She passed away about an hour and a half later,” he continues.
“I wept like a baby, holding her.
They asked me if I wanted to close her eyes and I did.
I left the hospital numb and remain so.”
Read Burstein’s full essay onTHR.
