Four years.
I was standing in the shower this morning thinking about that number.
Four years since Tom died.
And for perhaps the first time, I wasn’t thinking about four years in terms of how long he has been gone.
I was thinking about who I have become in those four years.
There is no version of this story where I am grateful Tom got ALS. I will never be grateful for ALS. It was horrible. It took things from him, from me, from our marriage and from our family, piece by piece.
I was prepared to love my husband.
When he got sick, I learned how to be his caregiver.
What I was never prepared for was to outlive him.
But life, fate, the universe, whatever you choose to call it, forced me into a life I had never imagined for myself.
ALS broke me.
Tom’s death shattered whatever pieces were left.
And eventually I had a choice.
I could spend the rest of my life staring at those pieces, wishing desperately that I could put them back exactly the way they had been.
Or I could start putting them together differently.
There is a Japanese art called kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The cracks aren’t hidden. They become part of the piece.
I think that’s probably the closest description I have for what these last four years have been.
I did not rebuild the life I lost.
I rebuilt myself.
And somewhere in that process, a completely different life began to emerge.
Caregiving humbled me.
There is really no prettier way to say it.
There were days I didn’t shower. Days I didn’t brush my teeth. I gained weight. I stopped taking care of myself because there simply wasn’t enough of me left after taking care of Tom.
There were hospital stays when the services available to families today simply weren’t available to us. I spent weeks at a time in hospitals, washing myself up in a public bathroom because going home wasn’t really an option.
Tom needed me there.
He felt safer when I was there because he knew I would advocate for him. He knew I would ask questions. He knew I would fight when something wasn’t right.
So I stayed.
I put my life on hold for my husband.
And when you live that way long enough, certain things stop looking very important.
I don’t particularly care about having the nicest car anymore.
I’ve lived in the bigger house. Turns out a bigger house is mostly extra rooms you don’t visit and more shit to clean.
I used to love expensive purses. Now I’ve essentially carried the same little crossbody for three years because it holds everything I need.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting things because of what they might tell other people about me.
I stopped asking what looks successful.
I started asking what feels like a good life.
And those are very different questions.
Something else has changed that I’ve only recently started noticing.
I react differently when I’m placed in situations I’ve never been in before.
Years ago, discomfort often became self-doubt.
If someone asked me to speak in front of a room, take on something bigger, or step into a space where I wasn’t quite sure I belonged, my first reaction was often some version of:
What could I possibly have to offer?
I still think that sometimes.
When I first started speaking publicly about our story, I genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone wanted to hear it. Sometimes I still find it strange that something I am still learning from myself can be useful to someone else.
And yes, I still get nervous.
The difference is that I no longer automatically interpret nervousness as evidence that I shouldn’t be there.
Now I can recognize:
This is uncomfortable because I’ve never been here before.
That’s different from:
I don’t belong here.
Maybe I’m not supposed to know exactly what I’m doing yet.
Maybe a new place is supposed to feel new.
That shift has followed me into this next phase of my life too.
I find myself in a completely new career, one I never planned for and certainly couldn’t have imagined years ago. I’ve only been in this new role for a week, so I have no idea exactly what it will become.
But I know how it feels.
It feels meaningful.
It feels like work I want to do, not simply work I have to do.
And there is something incredibly freeing about showing up without feeling like I have to prove myself all the time. I can be honest. I can be curious. I can ask questions. I can learn as I go.
I don’t need to be the smartest person in every room.
I just need to be fully present in it.
For a long time, so much of what I did was connected to Tom, to caregiving, to fighting for what he needed and eventually to carrying some of that work forward after he died.
That will always be part of me.
But this feels different now.
It doesn’t feel like I am continuing something only because of what happened to him.
It feels like I have found something that belongs to me too.
And I really love that.
Maybe this is the biggest change of all.
I don’t really ask myself anymore what I want my life to look like.
I ask:
How do I want my life to feel?
I want to feel useful.
I want to feel curious.
I want to feel connected.
I want to laugh.
I want meaningful work.
I want conversations that matter.
I want to travel and experience things.
I want to spend time with people because I genuinely want to be with them, not because maintaining the relationship feels like an obligation.
I want peace.
I want love.
I want joy.
And then I work backward.
What choices create more of those things?
It probably sounds incredibly simple.
It wasn’t simple for me.
For most of my life, I think I became whoever the circumstances required me to be.
I became a military wife.
I became a mother.
I became a professional.
I became a caregiver.
I became an advocate.
I became a widow.
Some of those identities I chose. Some were handed to me. Some I fought like hell to become good at because the people I loved depended on it.
But I also think I spent a lot of my life being guided by expectations.
What does a good wife do?
What does a good mother do?
What does a successful professional look like?
What are people expecting from me?
I’m not particularly interested in those questions anymore.
I care much more about whether the person I am becoming feels true to me.
One of the parts of caregiving I don’t think we talk enough about is what happens to everyone else in the family.
Trey was young when Tom became sick.
He needed his dad.
And eventually his dad could no longer be the dad he needed.
He also needed his mom.
And I wasn’t always able to give him all of me either.
I gave him what he needed in the ways I could. I loved him fiercely. But looking back, I can admit that during some very important years of his life, he didn’t always get me.
He got a mother whose attention was constantly divided.
A mother who was exhausted.
A mother trying to keep his father alive.
A mother managing a crisis that lasted years.
There was damage from that.
That’s hard for me to say, but it’s true.
And after Tom died, Trey and I had work to do too.
I apologized.
He forgave me.
We’ve talked.
We’ve grown.
He’s understood things as an adult that he couldn’t possibly have understood as a teenager.
And somehow, through all of that, we have built this incredibly beautiful relationship.
He’s about to turn 24.
He’s a grown man now.
I don’t need to parent him the way I once did. My job is different.
I get to guide when he wants guidance.
I get to listen.
I get to enjoy him.
And I genuinely enjoy the man my son has become.
There was a time during ALS, and certainly during the deepest grief afterward, when I couldn’t imagine that we would get here.
But we did.
Not because nothing happened.
Because we were willing to talk about what did.
After Tom died, I knew that someday I wanted to love again.
I assumed that someday would be years away.
I also knew that if I ever had another relationship, I wanted to walk into it differently.
I didn’t want another person to be responsible for healing me.
I needed to know myself first.
So I became familiar with myself.
I learned how to be alone.
I learned what I liked.
I learned what I didn’t.
I worked through my grief instead of constantly trying to outrun it.
I listened to it.
I began loving myself differently, not in some inspirational-quote-on-a-coffee-mug kind of way, but by genuinely getting to know the person underneath all of the roles I had spent decades filling.
And then life completely ignored my carefully imagined timeline.
Grant came along.
At first, I was simply happy to have someone to laugh with again.
God, I had missed laughing.
I had missed talking.
I had missed having someone to tell the stupid little things to.
Then came the good-morning texts.
The hand-holding.
The conversations.
The tiny, ordinary things you don’t realize you’ll miss until they’re gone.
And somewhere in all those ordinary moments, we built something extraordinary.
One of the things I value most about our relationship is that neither of us has to erase the life that came before it.
We talk about Tom.
We talk about Clare.
I love learning about Clare because understanding the love they shared helps me understand Grant.
He is the man I love today, in part, because he was loved by her.
And I am the woman he loves today, in part, because of the life and love I shared with Tom.
We didn’t come into this relationship pretending to be blank slates.
We came with whole histories.
And somehow, because we are both able to simply be ourselves, we meet each other in the places we need to be met.
There isn’t a lot of performance in our relationship.
There isn’t a lot of trying to be what the other person wants.
We are just ourselves.
And remarkably, who we authentically are seems to fit.
It has taught me something else.
When you finally give yourself fully to a life, a friendship, a relationship, or work that actually fits who you are, what comes back can be pretty incredible.
So who am I now?
That’s the question I keep coming back to.
Who am I when I’m no longer Tom’s caregiver?
Who am I when I’m no longer his wife, but will always be his widow?
Who am I when my child is grown and doesn’t need to be parented anymore?
Who am I when the career I spent decades building is behind me?
Who am I when so many of the identities that once defined my days have changed?
Apparently, I get to decide.
And I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood that before.
I’m someone who has found work that matters to me.
I’m a mother whose relationship with her adult son has become one of the great joys of her life.
I’m a widow who still loves her husband.
I’m a woman who unexpectedly fell in love again.
I’m someone who likes traveling and laughing and sitting around talking about absolutely nothing.
I’m someone who has become increasingly uninterested in impressing people.
And maybe most importantly, I’m someone who has finally stopped allowing other people’s expectations to determine who she should become.
For the first time in my life, I am letting me guide me.
This isn’t a story about conquering grief.
I haven’t.
I don’t think that’s the assignment.
And I certainly don’t believe there is some universal point when a widow or widower is supposed to be “better.”
Grief doesn’t work that way.
But at some point, I realized I had a decision to make about my own life.
Would grief be something I carried?
Or would grief become the place where I lived?
I chose to carry it.
Tom will always be part of me.
His death will always hurt.
ALS will always be part of my story.
Caregiving will always be part of my story.
Widowhood will always be part of my story.
And yes, those experiences will continue to shape some of the work I do and some of the choices I make.
But I am no longer living for Tom.
I am living for me.
Even writing that feels significant.
For years, my life revolved around keeping someone else alive.
Then it revolved around surviving his death.
And now?
Now I get to live.
I don’t know exactly what my life will look like five years from now.
Hell, I don’t know exactly what it will look like next year.
And strangely, that doesn’t scare me the way it once might have.
Because I know something now that I didn’t know before.
I know how I want it to feel.
And today?
It feels remarkably close to what I imagined.
I feel fulfilled by my work.
I have a beautiful relationship with my son.
I love a wonderful man who makes me laugh constantly and allows me to be exactly who I am.
I have friendships I choose because they bring something real to my life.
I have curiosity about what comes next.
I have peace I didn’t think I would ever feel again.
And I have this growing sense that the rest of my life doesn’t need to prove anything.
I don’t have to live up to anyone else’s expectation of what a widow should look like, what a woman in her 50s should be doing, what success should resemble, or what chapter is supposed to come next.
I just have to keep asking myself one question:
How do I want this life to feel?
Then I can work backward from there.
Maybe that’s the gold running through the cracks.
Four years later, I haven’t put my old life back together.
I’ve stopped trying.
I’m building something else.
Something imperfect.
Something authentic.
Something entirely mine.
And for however many years I am lucky enough to have left, that’s how I want to live them.