Five years without James, some things are still the same but also completely different at the same time. I miss having a partner in this crazy world. My biggest hurt these days is not for myself but for the kids. So much is happening in their lives that he should be here for. I miss you so much JD. Seventeen years ago we spent New Years on the news with our newborn Julia. Now, New Years Day is tainted forever. I have not said “Happy New Years” to anyone since 1/1/21. For us, that is never going to be a Happy Day ever again. Always …

I have such great memories of my daughter & son-in-laws wedding. They were only married a little over 2 years. Adam died of Covid and I can’t help wondering how much different life would be right now, if he was still with us.

Today is day 345. 345 days of feeling lost, untethered, disconnected. 345 days of waking up to the same thought. Emery’s gone. My daughter died. She’s never coming back. 345 days of not being able to text her or call her, but mostly text her because she hated talking on the phone. 345 days of a missing that is so deep I feel it in my bones, and they hurt. 345 nights of either sleeping twelve hours and still not feeling ready to get up, or not sleeping at all. 345 days of not understanding how my healthy, 34-year-old daughter could be healthy on Christmas and gone ten days later. She died from the flu. She was hospitalized on the evening of January 1st and died on the morning of January 4th. How can a mother possibly make sense of the loss of her healthy child in 2 1/2 days, from the flu that the rest of her family also had after Christmas? All I know is that 345 days is not enough time to understand the new reality I’m living in.

In the early weeks after Emery’s death, I sat down and wrote everything I could remember from the afternoon of January 1, 2025, to 11:38 am on January 4th. I needed to offload it from my brain, and I also needed to remember something I was trying so hard to forget, out of a maternal need. I ended up with over 100 typed pages, which I haven’t gone back to read but have saved. Maybe they will never be read again, by anyone, but the process of writing the words gave me a moment of letting go. Maybe someday my two sons, my son-in-law, or my grandchildren will want to read the account of what happened through my eyes and my words. It is not a measured timeline of events that one would read in her medical records, but rather, the emotions of the moments that stuck with me. The kindness of the nurses —the first one in the ICU at Foothills Hospital in Boulder, who used the end of a surgical glove to tie my daughter’s long hair away from her face before she was intubated. Two days later, another nurse, while in the ICU in a Denver hospital, braided her hair. I held that braid as I tried to tell her goodbye, moments before our family told the doctor to turn off the machines that were keeping her alive. My 100 typed pages were my emotions, woven with love and fear, that have become the fabric of my new reality.

Recently, I visited Emery’s house, now empty one soon to be on the market. I walked through her wildflower spiral garden, a spiral I had often walked with my grandchildren in the summer. One particular day, while Arlo and Muna were trying to find their “pet” toad, who lived among the flowers, I glanced over and saw Emery standing at the edge of the garden, smiling — something she often did while watching me play with her children. I returned her smile, a gesture deep with emotion, understood by both of us: love for each other and for Arlo and Muna. Being there without her or the children was one of the loneliest moments I’ve felt since she died.

For 345 days, and often without warning, I’ve cried. Sometimes, it hits me with the same fervency as it did at 11:38 am on the morning of January 4th, and other days, it’s quiet tears that roll down my cheeks, sometimes without me even noticing. No one should ever have to relive those feelings of anguish that present themselves, frequently and at unexpected moments…while passing a particular food that Emery loved at the grocery store or seeing a lilac bush, her favorite, in bloom, or a certain song that is overheard in a crowded store, when I feel like I’m the only one who is listening. It usually passes quickly, but leaves a feeling that wants to hang on, as if I need to be reminded.

I often return to the memory of telling Emery goodbye, while machines kept her alive in a hospital in Denver, her time on this earth being left in her family’s hands, who told the doctors when to turn the machines off. A tiny part of me thinks there might be a different outcome when I go through that last day in my mind. Much in the same way, I would call my Dad’s phone after he died four months before Emery, thinking maybe, just maybe, he would answer. Of course, he never did, but what if he had? Joan Didion called it magical thinking. I call it misplaced hopefulness or an inability to accept reality. But the ending doesn’t change.

My son-in-law, Miles, still gives the doctor a nod to indicate that we’re ready, and she still shuts down the machines. The doctor still gives Emery her final physical exam, and she still pulls out her phone to do what I’ve seen so many times in the movies, yet I still brace myself, knowing what’s next. “Time of death, 11:38 am.” The nurse still writes it down.

The room goes quiet. So quiet, I can hear every one of our hearts beating, but the one that stopped beating is the loudest. My heart hovers in the space between where I’m standing and Emery, who is now referred to as a body, is lying. Maybe it’s not sure where it belongs. Maybe it still doesn’t know, 345 days later.

My dear mother Vera Frieda Fischer passed away after a long illness almost a week ago at age 95. She was an only child of German immigrants who came to America after World War 1. She lost her father when she was 10 years old and lost her mother when she was 36 years old. I was blessed to have her for almost 74 years.

When she was hospitalized with Acute Respiratory Distress from Bilateral Pneumonia, I could visit and be with her in the hospital. I was able to communicate fully with a team of Pulmonologists, Hospitalists, Nurses, and Respiratory Therapists on a regular ongoing basis. I was able to hold her hand and be with her when she died. I can make all the necessary final arrangements for her.

I am still traumatized that I had none of this when Johnny was hospitalized during the Covid lockdown
with Severe Acute Respiratory Distress. He was completely alone. Precious time was taken away from us. I also barely had any communication with hospital professionals. I could not make any arrangements. It was hard to get into a Funeral Home and get his body picked up from the hospital. We could not have a wake and Church service. It was horrific.

I am so grateful I could be with my mother in her final days. I truly hope that she and Johnny, her son, are now together again. May they both rest in eternal peace. They will forever be missed. I am now the last member of the family I grew up with and the keeper of all the memories.

I

December 20, 2025 marks five years since Steve left this world. He did not leave willingly. He was taken by COVID-19, contracted inside an HCA hospital that assured the public it was open and safe.

Grief does not move in straight lines. Five years later, I am not whole. I am not the person I was when our lives were intertwined. I keep trying — because trying is what remains when nothing is certain. My therapist says trying is doing. Still, I ask myself what that doing is supposed to look like when the world refuses to acknowledge the millions who died from COVID, or the families left behind to carry that loss quietly.

I isolate more now. I cannot sit comfortably among Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, Charlie Kirk acolytes, or people who announce, as if neutrality were moral, that they “don’t talk politics.” What happened to my husband was not theoretical, it was political and it’s still political. 

So I live in a smaller, quieter place.  I drink coffee with Coffee Mate Natural Bliss sweet cream from Steve’s coffee machine. I draw neurographica lines, hoping to reroute a brain reshaped by trauma. I keep Steve’s stones close. I wear his Halston cologne — the one he used every day — misting it onto my skin, our bed, the pillow sewn from one of his shirts.

And sometimes I receive signs. Sandhill cranes appearing when I least expect them. Dolphins surfacing briefly, as if to say hello. A tortoise crossing my path, deliberate and unhurried. I look up the spiritual meanings of these sightings. I let them speak to me. I find feathers and coins  — on sidewalks, in parking lots, in places that have no special association to us. But, I read what these finds are said to mean. I choose to believe they are messages from Steve, small reassurances sent across whatever distance now exists between us.

These are not attempts to move on. There is no moving on. Only ways of staying in conversation with love. Proof that memory is not weakness, that connection does not end just because a body does.
Five years later, joy does not arrive big or whole. It arrives in fragments — scent, ritual, wings, water, metal warmed by the sun — and it is not enough. But it is all I have.