Survival

Written October 16th, 2025.

I sit in the airport and the world around me buzzes. People moving, chatting.

Life seems good for them. Maybe not all of them.

I watch the noise and I feel numb.

My eyes are swollen and the bone pockets around them hurt from crying this morning. My jaw is tense.

I spent the last hour in the terminal on the phone with Principle, the family leave benefit company, trying to sort out next steps as my current leave comes to a close. I wonder if the people around me can hear me telling the person on the other side of the phone, “my husband is dead”.

The world spins around me but I feel stuck in this deep dark space.

It’ll be two months tomorrow. Two entire months without Jason.

He is never coming back.

My heart can’t handle that truth.

It aches deep inside me. I miss him.

I wonder about the life we could’ve had and what could’ve been.

What life would’ve been like had he never been diagnosed with cancer? Or if the cancer never came back after chemo. What would that have looked like? That is a version of this story I long for. There are moments of his treatment that made us stronger, I do believe that. But what could’ve we done in that time instead. What could’ve we been doing now. I like to think we would’ve been even better than we were, had we been given the space to grow more. But we were pretty damn good.

It doesn’t feel fair.

I am traveling to Tucson this weekend to see my sister, and traveling hit me in ways that I really didn’t imagine.

Stepping into the airport for the first time since losing Jason, but also the first time since we had gotten back from our honeymoon in Bali.

That feels like a lifetime ago, everything felt so different then.

We had just gotten married and had the most blissful honeymoon. We were living a fairy tail, and in a way a little bit a false reality filled with a lot of false hope.

It felt like we had made it through, even though we hadn’t.

We were coming back to what we assumed would be more treatment for Jason just with the simple fact that his numbers were going up.

But never once did we expect things would advance so rapidly in the way that they did. Even then, looking back at a year ago when we found out that Jason’s cancer had reoccurred, I never once imagined that I’d be here a year later without him by my side.

This is a weird space in that I have never been to Tucson without Jason. This was a place we had only come together. It was our room at Megan’s. Unlike many things, this was never just mine and something he fell into it.

This was what was ours.

Jason was such an incredible brother in law, he spent so much time and energy helping Megan and my parents work on her condo in the times we’d come down here.

We had plans of things that we’d like to go do and see together down here while she finished residency, because the couple times that we had been down here were rather quick trips over the holidays and exploring just was not the way things worked out.

I arrived and I sat down in her place, and I cried.

Cried simply for the fact that Jason wasn’t here and like I say over and over almost every single day, I miss him.

I just miss him.

The words seem so simple but it’s true and there’s nothing else to add.

I just miss him and I wish he was here.

There’s a void inside of me that follows me around while the world keeps spinning and people hustle and bustle.

A feeling that was so apparent in the airport and screams loudly in most any public setting. I think to myself I surely can’t be the only one in this sea of people hurting so badly.

It’s a testament to you never know what someone else is carrying.

A lot can hide behind a smile.

It’s really put a different perspective on the way I see the world.

People tell me that I’m strong and that I am brave, but I don’t feel strong and brave.

I know when said, those words are always well intended. But strong and brave feel like things that are a choice in this world. This road, feels anything but a choice. I may be strong and brave in the eyes of the people who are not forced to walk this road, but to me, I don’t really have any other choice.

What might seem strong and brave on the surface is survival.