One Month Later

It’s been a month since Cassidy died.

I keep writing that sentence and reading it back to myself like maybe repetition will make it feel real. It doesn’t. A month sounds like something measurable, something that should come with progress, something that should feel like distance. But there is no distance yet. There is just before February 24th, and after February 24th. And I am still learning how to live in the “after.”

One of the first things we did in this new version of life was celebrate him.

On March 15th, we gathered at Coors Field for his celebration of life. Standing there, surrounded by so many people who loved him, felt both surreal and exactly right at the same time. The room was full in the way Cassidy’s life was full…full of family, coworkers, neighbors, friends from every chapter of his life, people who had known him forever and people who had only known him briefly but somehow still became part of his orbit.

There were stories I had heard before and some I had never heard at all. There was laughter that sounded like him, moments where I caught myself smiling without thinking, the way I always did when he was nearby. And for a few minutes at a time, it almost felt like we were all just gathered because Cassidy was somewhere in the building and would walk in any second.

It was beautiful and absolutely devastating all at once. But it was exactly what he deserved.

Since then, the quiet has settled back in.

People ask how I’m doing, and the honest answer is that this fucking sucks. There isn’t a softer way to say it. There isn’t a poetic version of grief yet. I miss him every single day in ways I expected and in ways I didn’t know were possible.

I miss him in the ordinary moments the most.

I miss turning to tell him something small and realizing halfway through the sentence that there’s no one there to hear it the way he would have. I miss the way we used to talk at night before falling asleep. I miss having someone who already knew the backstory to everything in my life. I miss not having to explain myself. I miss walking into a room and knowing exactly where he would be sitting.

I still look for him everywhere. When I walk into the house or into a room. When I hear a noise in the kitchen. When I pass the couch. When I wake up in the morning. There’s still a part of me that expects him to be there, like maybe this is all some long misunderstanding that hasn’t corrected itself yet.

It doesn’t feel real that he’s gone.

I know that he is, I was there. I held his hand and watched him take his last breaths. And still, there’s a part of my brain that keeps insisting he’s just somewhere else in the house. Somewhere nearby. Somewhere I haven’t checked yet. Grief does strange things like that.

There’s something else I didn’t expect to be this hard….Learning how to talk about him in the past tense.

People say things like “Cassidy was so funny,” or “he was such a good friend,” and every time I hear it, something inside me resists. My instinct is still to say is. He is funny. He is kind. He is stubborn and thoughtful and loyal and endlessly curious about the world.

He still feels like a present part of my life but I’m slowly realizing that the world expects me to move him into the past. Into sentences that end instead of continue. Into memories instead of conversations.

And I fucking hate that.

I hate how unnatural it feels to say “he was.” I hate how final it sounds. I hate how it makes it feel like he belongs somewhere behind me instead of beside me. Sometimes I catch myself correcting my own sentences halfway through. Sometimes I say “is” and then pause, unsure if I’m supposed to change it. Sometimes I refuse to change it at all.

Because loving someone doesn’t suddenly become past tense just because they’re gone. He was my person….He is my person and I’m still learning what it means to live in a world where both of those things are true at the same time.

I’ve lost people before. I lost my biological dad, my real-life dad, both of my grandmothers, my grandfather, and a few friends I never expected to say goodbye to. I thought I understood loss. I didn’t.

Losing a spouse is something entirely different.

When you lose a parent or a grandparent or a friend, you lose someone who shaped your life. Someone who held a place in your story. Someone who loved you in a way only they could. And that loss is real and deep and permanent.

But when you lose your spouse, you lose the person who was living your life with you. You lose the witness to your everyday existence. You lose the person who knew what you were going to say before you finished the sentence. The one who remembered the same stories you did. The one who helped make decisions about what came next. The one who shared the routines that quietly build a life together.

You lose the future you were planning without even realizing you were planning it. This wasn’t someone assigned to me by birth. This was someone I chose…someone who chose me back. Someone I expected to grow old with. Someone I expected to argue with about small things and laugh with about bigger things and sit next to on ordinary Tuesday nights for the rest of my life.

You don’t expect to lose that person at 36. You don’t expect to be the one who stays behind holding all of the memories alone. There is a particular loneliness in that realization that I don’t think I could have understood before living it.

Sometimes I still catch myself thinking, I’ll tell Cassidy.
And then I remember…

Sometimes I still reach for my phone to text him.
And then I remember…

Sometimes I still walk into a room expecting him to already be there.
And then I remember…

It happens over and over again. The remembering is its own kind of heartbreak. People say the first month is the hardest. I don’t know if that’s true. Right now it just feels like the first month is the most unreal. Like I’m still waiting for something to shift back into place even though I know it won’t.

I miss him in the big ways…. I miss him in the small ways….I miss the version of myself that existed when he was here with me.

I said it earlier but I need to say it again…He was my person. He is my person. Learning how to live in a world without him in it is the hardest thing I have ever done.

But I loved him completely and he loved me the same way. Even now—especially now—that still feels like the most important thing.