From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. Today on the show, we have

a story about how sometimes a family is held together by untruths. These aren't necessarily

outright lies, but there are evasions, there are avoidances, there are these

silences that cover something up. The essay is written by David Caleb. In his

family, the untruth was about how David is gay and very happily married to a

man. David's whole family kept this a secret from his grandmother. His essay is

called The House Where My Husband Doesn't Exist and it begins with David returning

to his hometown to go to a family gathering. I rang the doorbell of my

grandmother's house and then I remembered to pull off my wedding ring. I slipped

it into my pocket and I was someone else, an actor, playing a fictional version of

me. When I got married, my family made a decision for my grandmother. They

agreed that everyone could know about my husband except her. They feared she

would disown me, excoriate my father, blame my mother, my grandmother was from the

old country and she lived by old rules. My grandmother sat in the same spot on the

couch where I've always known her to be, but now she was breathing through it

too connected to an oxygen tank. David, she called out, raising her arms. I'm dying

she said. My grandmother has been dying for 20 years. On that day, however, her

shrunken body declared that truth in a way her voice never could. I love you,

Nana. I said, cancer, she said. I love you. I replied. Our relationship had been

built on decades of two-minute conversations about her most recent aches and

pains. I knew a little about her past other than that she'd had a tumultuous

life in Palestine being married off to an older man and becoming a mother while in

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