 Completed in 2002 when gay marriage was illegal in the U.S., the only legal protections available to gay and lesbian couples were about death; wills and health care proxies.Cronin created the marble mortuary statue of the two lovers, a decade before the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2012.The art historian Robert Rosenblum described the work as "so imaginative a leap into an artist's personal life and so revolutionary a monument in terms of social history that it demands a full scale monograph."