By Sarah E. Murphy

August 7. My parents’ 65th wedding anniversary. My mother died in October 2025, a decade after my father, so it’s the first time they’re able to celebrate together since 2015.

Conflicted, I found myself hoping this day would eventually come while helplessly watching my mother decline from dementia over the past few years, sometimes hearing her call out to my dad to save her from the misery of her reality.

“Take me home, Jimmy. I just want to go home.”

While it gives me comfort to know they’re reunited, I don’t understand why my husband and I were denied that same gift of longevity.

Chris and I left the house we’ve shared for the last 25 years on Friday, May 29, heading for what we assumed would be a routine appointment in his cancer journey, bringing us one step closer to the end of his treatment. Instead, he never came home.

It’s been nearly two months since our life together ended on June 11. It feels like both seconds and centuries and I’m exhausted thinking of my future without him.

I’m not in denial, but my brain can’t process it, and my heart is shattered beyond repair.

Getting out of bed each morning is a victory, and I weigh twenty pounds less than I did on my wedding day.

The air conditioning infamously went out during my parents’ wedding reception and today, my cat and I are sweltering in the 84-degree heat because I can’t figure out the window unit Chris had down to a science.

I’m not ready to engage with people who enjoy “normal” lives that aren’t defined by trauma, panic attacks, and depression, holing up like Emily Dickinson as the weeks pass. My only focus is my mental health and therapy, attempting to get strong enough to write a proper tribute and plan a celebration of life worthy of my best friend.

I feel like an alien observing human life around me, listening to the incessant sounds of construction on an ugly ostentatious rebuild right outside my door. I’m once again living Auden’s “Funeral Blues” in a world that doesn’t even use punctuation let alone read poetry.

Social media is a depressing reminder of how self-absorbed and entitled people of all ages have become. “Influencers” who are actually followers. “Activists” with strange bedfellows motivated by personal agenda. Grief “experts” desperate for attention talking *at* me with their ubiquitous trending audio and obnoxious captions. People who travel merely to post.

Giant egos and tiny microphones. So fucking vapid and tedious.

People in my community are now bitching online about the size of town issued trash barrels. Embarrassing first world problems.

Meanwhile I spent my fifteenth wedding anniversary on June 26 alone in the house with my husband’s ashes.

Our simple little life became a permanent downward spiral last August, when Chris began having trouble swallowing. Four weeks after my mother’s death in October, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the same type his father survived, living into his 80s.

Twelve months later, and my 58-year-old husband is gone. He didn’t get the luxury of a long life as his father did, and it fills me with rage. His mother is equally fortunate and has countless reasons to be grateful. At 87, she had a benign tumor removed while her youngest child began an aggressive round of chemo/immunotherapy. Not once did he complain or ask why it was happening to him. He’s not “in a better place.” He’d give anything to be here right now.

One of my last normal memories of my husband is watching him on Mother’s Day from the front bedroom window as he pruned the periwinkle blue hydrangeas his grandmother planted in the 1950s. His Faith No More shirt, which we bought when I took him in celebration of our fourth anniversary in 2015, hung loosely on his large frame, his hair short and wiry from the chemo. Despite his changed appearance, he moved methodically in signature fashion, focused and intentional.

A few nights ago, the wind took the last brilliant bloom from that bush; the rest were already dried and faded from the August heat. I went outside and picked it up off the lawn protectively as if it held some power to summon him.