“You know, when you go, you go. You just don’t know,” a friend used to say to me.
Mortality is the one truth we all share, whether we admit it or not. And yet, how we live with that truth varies. “John,” a recent widower I knew, had his own way of facing it: by keeping the promises his wife left behind, as if honoring them could hold together what grief had undone.
Before writing about his late wife, he wrote about football
Grief clinicians often say that the first weeks after a spouse’s death are a medical event as much as an emotional one. The body goes into shock, cognition blurs, and people move through tasks automatically. John didn’t know this at the time, but everything he was experiencing (the numbness, the autopilot) is exactly what clinicians expect in acute grief.
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He began journaling after a friend suggested it shortly after her death. John initially wrote fantasy football recaps and drafts, but at some point his efforts leaned more toward “Sally.”
John didn’t have a clue why he wanted to put his pen to paper. He was simply compelled to write, a mind reaching for order where none existed.
In his musings, he wrote that perhaps his son would like to read it someday if he ever felt disconnected, confused, or lost. Or perhaps if his memory, God forbid, failed him later in life, this would be the only time he could be a decent “narrator.”
Not even familiar with journaling, he later learned that therapeutically it’s considered a good self-help tool. It became his way of channeling his thoughts of remembering his late wife, Sally. All he knew then was that he wasn’t ready to get on with his life yet.
The first days
She had passed away just a little over ten days earlier. He was sleeping next to her when Sally died sometime in the morning. He hadn’t remembered the exact time she died.
Just a couple of days ago, he received Sally’s ashes along with a dozen or so death certificates. And on that same day, it would have been their twenty-third anniversary together. He broke down with the box that was handed to him, not dramatically, but with the kind of grief that arrives without warning, the kind that pulls a person under before they can brace for it.
One of the only conversations they had about cremation was just a few months earlier, that if she were to die, she’d be OK with being cremated. They even discussed where to spread the ashes: perhaps a beach on Nantucket or up in the mountains in Colorado.
She then whispered to John words he broke into tears hearing and never forgot:
“I’d really just want to be here with you. Is that OK?”
For John, it was the most beautiful, heartbreaking thing one could hear. She now rests in their home next to their beloved pet dog’s ashes.
He then recounted the moments he vaguely remembered shortly after her death, how he washed her face and put on a knitted hat to make her appear more presentable to her son and family members when they came in. The funeral happened shortly after, three days later.
John later recalled how everything became blank again in his mind. He moved through those days on autopilot, playing host to family and friends as well as a new widower, the choreography intact even when the meaning wasn’t.
Somehow, he found himself taking care of responsibilities that needed to be done: calling hospice, calling the rabbi, writing a eulogy, contacting relatives and friends. John even made a point to dispose of anything related to Sally’s cancer tumors. He kept only her “happy and healthy” belongings and mementos from before her illness.
Daylight was management. Evening was reality
What surprised John most in those early days was how grief hid behind this “busy work.” It kept him together, but it also kept him from fully realizing the enormity of what he had lost.
It waited until the evenings, when the house was quiet, when the distractions faded, when the medication he was prescribed to “relax” dulled just enough for the truth to surface. That’s when the loss stopped being an event and started becoming a reality he’d been living.
Shiva
Once Shiva (a week-long mourning period) began, John’s days shifted. People started arriving around 4:30 each afternoon, and by early evening the house was full again. John drank and laughed with friends, in an effort to numb the pain.
Although the official end time was 8:30, John always asked whoever remained to stay a little longer. It wasn’t about extending hospitality; it was about delaying the moment the house would empty and the loneliness would settle in. Even an hour more helped.
The shock of the passing
The funeral felt like a blur. John insisted on speaking, even though he wasn’t sure he could. Looking back, he realized he was still in shock, the only explanation for how he managed to stand in front of a room full of people and talk about her without breaking down. Later that night, he replayed every word of the eulogy in his mind, wondering whether he had captured who she truly was, not just to others, but to him and to their son.
After Shiva: the collapse
When Shiva ended, the real collapse began for John. The distractions were gone, the house was quiet again, and grief finally showed its full force. It was the decompression sickness of grief: the pain that hits only after the surface is reached.
John described those first days as a kind of freefall, not the bottom, but the realization that he couldn’t even see the bottom yet. His “writing exercise” wasn’t off to a great start either.
The cruelty of grief
He couldn’t sleep well at night. He could still talk to people, handle estate tasks, and move through the day, but he often felt outside his own life, present but not fully plugged back in.
Even simple tasks felt impossible. The loneliness was painful and terrible: He wasn’t without support, but the one person he needed was the one who could no longer offer it. He barely ate, always feeling on the verge of throwing up.
Their home made it even worse. Every room felt like a museum of Sally. Her choices (the objects she curated, the routines she built), even harmless things, like a tube of lip balm or the presets on her car radio, could easily knock the wind out of him.
Silence wasn’t much better. He tried reading about grief, hoping for a roadmap, but all he learned was that there isn’t one.
Intense loneliness and longing
What John felt wasn’t just the loss of the present; it was the loss of his best friend and the future they had planned: the trips they would never take, the retirement they imagined, the child they had raised together, the holidays they shared, the milestones he would now attend alone. Without her, the house felt frozen in time, and he felt stuck in place while everyone else moved forward. He longed for her, someone to talk with, eat with, and simply exist beside. He called his progress “baby steps,” but they were small steps all the same.
Burning the medical papers
What unsettled John wasn’t just the grief itself, but the fear that the last six months would eclipse everything that came before. He refused to overwrite the years they had built together.
Searching for his son’s birth certificate one day, he ended up knee-deep in the files his wife had organized: real estate papers, documents, and eventually the thick folder that held every report from her cancer treatment. He reluctantly stumbled upon those papers. There were well over a hundred files, including Sally’s meticulous notes from their meeting with the top cancer specialist at the hospital, which laid out her entire treatment plan. It was a daunting reminder of the battle they had been preparing for.
He suddenly took the stack outside and burned the medical papers in the fire pit she once bought him, hoping it would bring relief. He vowed never to revisit any of it.
The memories came back
Instead, the memories came back in sharp flashes: the first misdiagnosis, the brief moment of hope she might have been cancer-free, the reversal that changed everything. He realized he didn’t want these months to become her legacy.
Future memories
John wanted their son to remember her life (the years of parenting, the rituals, the humor, the small details that made her unmistakably herself), not just the part that broke them. It was the impossible work of trying to preserve her while trying to erase the grief that surrounded her. He’d admit to himself often just how much grief sucks.
He kept telling himself he had to do this for both him and his son, reclaiming the memories that came before, even though John felt, once again, like a fearful child. It was the quiet loneliness of a father trying to curate a mother’s legacy for his only child.
The plastic spoon
Six months after her death, the grief didn’t soften; it simply changed form. What undid John one afternoon wasn’t a holiday or an anniversary but a plastic spoon he found in the kitchen drawer, the one she used when her illness made ordinary utensils too heavy. A harmless object cracked something open in him, the way grief waits for the smallest excuse.
He broke down and cried. John realized then that grief doesn’t always arrive in the big moments.
As time went by, he attended therapy (sometimes up to three group and individual therapy sessions a week), trying to find a place where the sadness could land without breaking him. The only thing that reliably helped was volunteering regularly at a local dog shelter.
It was also to honor Sally’s love for dogs. The dogs didn’t expect him to be OK. They just needed care, and for a few hours at a time, that was enough.
Therapists often describe grief as a long rehabilitation process, not something to “get over,” but something to learn to live beside. John’s experience mirrors what clinicians see: grief that shifts forms, resurfaces unexpectedly, and requires support, structure, and time.
Moving forward, attempting to ease the pain
John isn’t healed. He isn’t supposed to be. He’s just taking the next step, even when he doesn’t know where it leads.
John knows the grief isn’t going anywhere, but he’s learning how to live beside it instead of inside it. He’s taking the help that’s offered, seeking out the people who understand, and trying to build a future for his son. He put everything on the line for his wife who passed away. Forward is the only direction he has, even when it doesn’t feel like a direction at all, because sometimes survival is nothing more than moving through the day until meaning returns.
Love still remains
There will always be sadness in remembering, but there can be joy, too: not as a replacement, but as a companion. It’s a mix of sorrow and happiness only grief can produce.
What comes next won’t erase what came before. It will simply sit alongside it, the way grief and love always do.
J.H. Lynn is an entrepreneur and patient advocate.
