5 Months Without Cassidy

Five months.

It feels impossible that I've lived five months in a world that doesn't have Cassidy in it. Lately, the word that keeps coming to mind is lonely…Not alone, lonely. There's a difference. I have incredible people surrounding me. Friends who check in, neighbors who have become family, coworkers who continue to support me, truly a community that has loved me through the worst season of my life.

And still...I've never felt loneliness quite like this.

Because loneliness isn't always about the number of people around you. Sometimes it's about the absence of the one person you wanted to tell everything to. It's the moment something funny happens and your first instinct is to text them or reaching over in bed without thinking. It's making dinner for one when you've spent years cooking for two…It's looking across the couch and realizing no one is sitting in "their spot. It's coming home after a really good day... or a really bad one... and knowing no one is waiting to hear about it the way they used to.

Five months later, I'm realizing that loneliness isn't loud, it's incredibly quiet. The hardest part about grief lately isn't that the world stopped, it's that it didn't. People are slowly settling back into their normal lives, exactly as they should. Kids are growing up, vacations are being planned, birthdays are celebrated, careers move forward, or people are making plans for next year.

Life continues…mine did too but it isn't my old life continuing, it's an entirely different one. Sometimes I catch myself listening to conversations about weekend plans or future vacations or retirement goals, and I realize those conversations belong to a version of me that no longer exists. The future Cassidy and I spent years quietly building disappeared overnight.

I'm not jealous of people whose lives kept moving (maybe I am???)… I'm grateful they didn't have to experience this, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel isolating sometimes. Losing Cassidy has changed so much about the way I look at people. I notice the small things now like the husband who absentmindedly reaches for his wife's hand in the grocery store or the couple arguing over something completely insignificant. Maybe even the friend who calls their mom just because and the family eating dinner together.

Those ordinary moments don't feel ordinary anymore, they feel precious. I think losing someone you love rewires your definition of what's important. The things I used to stress over don't carry the same weight anymore but the people I love do.

I've also realized that my patience has changed, or maybe disappeared. I feel like I have so much grace for people who are trying, so much grace for people navigating hard things but I have very little patience left for people who take the people in their lives for granted.

Life is painfully, unfairly short, tomorrow isn't promised and once you've watched the person you love take their last breath, it's hard to listen to people complain about things that, in the grand scheme of life, simply don't matter.

Maybe that's unfair or maybe it's part of grief or maybe it's one of the gifts Cassidy unknowingly left me. He reminded me—through losing him—just how extraordinary ordinary life really is…a random Tuesday dinner together, watching TV on the couch, running errands, laughing at inside jokes no one else understands…those weren't interruptions to life, they were life.

I wish more people understood that before they have to learn it the hard way. Five months later, I'm still lonely, I still miss him every single day but I'm also deeply grateful. Grateful for the people who have refused to let me do this alone, for friends who continue to show up long after everyone else assumes you're "doing better." I’m grateful for neighbors who became family, for every person who says his name, and insanely grateful that I got to love someone so completely that losing him could change me this profoundly.

I wish I still had him…I'd choose that over every lesson grief has taught me, every single time. But since I don't I'll spend the rest of my life trying to love people the way losing him taught me they deserve to be loved.