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.