2 Months Without Cassidy

It has been two months since Cassidy died….I keep writing that sentence and reading it back to myself like maybe repetition will make it feel real. It still doesn’t. A month sounded abstract. Two months sounds like something that should come with distance, or clarity, or progress.

Instead, it just feels like more time without him.

There is still a version of my brain that expects him to be in the next room. I still walk into spaces and look for him without thinking, start sentences in my head like I’m about to tell him something, or reach for my phone before remembering there’s no one on the other end who already knows what I mean without explanation.

It doesn’t feel real that he’s gone. I know he is, I was there. I held his hand when he died, I watched his breathing slow, I said goodbye. And still, there is a part of me that believes this is temporary. That he’s somewhere else in the house. That I just haven’t checked the right room yet.

Grief is strange like that.

One of the hardest things these last two months has been learning how to show up for myself again. For so long, my entire life had direction. There were medications to track, appointments to make, doctors to talk to, symptoms to watch, decisions to make. He needed me in very real, immediate ways every single day. Now there is space where that urgency used to live and I don’t always know what to do with it.

Some days I forget to eat until late afternoon. Some days I move through the house like I’m waiting for instructions that never come. Some days I feel almost normal for an hour and then something small reminds me that nothing about my life is normal anymore.

Grief isn’t one emotion. It’s layers. At my core, I am so fucking sad, that part is constant. But layered around that sadness are things I didn’t expect to exist at the same time. I laugh, feel grateful, angry, proud of how hard he fought, relief that he isn’t suffering anymore. I feel completely disoriented that this is my life now. All of those things exist together and I’m learning that none of them cancel each other out.

Something else I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is anticipatory grief. I didn’t talk about it much while Cassidy was alive…. I don’t even think I admitted it to myself at the time. But looking back now, I can see that I started grieving him long before he died.

I started grieving him when conversations changed, when the quick back-and-forth we always had started breaking in the middle…when I could see him searching for words that used to come easily and his body started asking more from him than it could give back.

I started grieving when the plans we were making quietly shifted into something else without either of us saying it out loud. There were moments in hospital rooms when I could feel something changing and didn’t have language for it yet. Moments in Houston when I understood the stakes differently than I let myself admit. Moments during radiation when I realized I was already missing parts of him while he was still sitting next to me.

I called it being strong…staying hopeful or just getting through the next step. But in reality, it was grief. I was grieving him before I ever lost him. People sometimes think grief starts when someone dies but for me, it started months earlier. It just didn’t have a name yet.

Something I’m still learning, two months into this, is that widowhood isn’t just grief. It’s logistics, silence, and oddly my identity. It’s realizing there are decisions no one else is automatically part of anymore. It’s noticing how often I still think in “we” and then having to correct myself. It’s walking into spaces where people naturally look for the other half of the pair you used to be.

There are moments when the world still treats me like part of a couple, and moments when it suddenly doesn’t. Both are hard. There’s also something strange about being widowed this young. Most people my age are building lives with their partners, not learning how to live without them. The language around loss at this stage of life is thin, there aren’t many scripts for what this is supposed to look like, which means I’m mostly figuring it out as I go.

Sometimes I feel angry that this is my life now, that others are just existing with their person when mine was taken away…that feels lonely in a way I didn’t expect. Not because people don’t care but because there aren’t many people standing in the same place I am. I’m still learning what it means to be someone who carries this story now. Someone whose future looks different than the one she was building just a few months ago. Someone who still reaches for him without thinking.

Last weekend was the first time I stepped back into the real world for myself since December.

Jenny came to town, and somehow I found myself at TaylorFest with Jenny, Chelsea, and Ashley—wrapped in what honestly felt like friendship-bubble wrap. They created a space where I didn’t have to explain myself, didn’t have to be strong, didn’t have to pretend I was okay. I just got to exist. TaylorFest has always been one of those places that felt like pure joy before Cassidy got sick. Walking back into that space without him felt impossible until it wasn’t. I laughed, sang, stood in a room full of people and remembered what it felt like to be part of the world again, even if just for a few hours. I cried to his favorite songs and danced the night away with people who never once left my side during this insane journey that is now my daily life.

It didn’t fix anything or make me miss him less, but it reminded me that pieces of me are still here too. Two months later, I am still looking for him in every room I enter, still learning how to talk about him in the past tense when he feels so present in my life, still figuring out how to take care of myself without the structure of taking care of him.

I’m still carrying him with me in every version of whatever comes next because he was my person, he is my person and loving him is still the truest thing I know how to do.