The whole purpose of this blog isn’t really to share with the world, but to document. For what? I don’t really know.
The summer of 2023 was the hardest of my life. Literally life-altering.
A colleague was going on sabbatical, so I was taking on a significant amount of additional work. I didn’t mind. I liked the idea of giving him the space to step away, and we had done a lot of planning to get there. His sabbatical started in May. I was gearing up for a work-heavy summer and felt ready for it.
There was no way I could have known what that summer was actually going to look like.
In June, I learned that a friend had passed away. He had gone to Florida on vacation, was caught in a riptide, and drowned. I often think about how frightening that must be. In 2016, while I was doing triathlons, a member of our group drowned during a race. I remember watching a video of him entering the water for the swim, and then seeing his bike and shoes still sitting at the transition area. How do you go into the water and not come out?
Both were healthy men in their late twenties and early thirties. They went into the water, and they didn’t come out. That line has never left me.
A few weeks later, my mom called to tell me my uncle had passed. He had been sick, with end-stage liver cancer, in hospice. We hadn’t been close. Political rhetoric had gotten in the way, and he was never able to see past it, no matter how much I tried. But liver cancer is an awful way to go. When I heard some of the details, I had to stop. No one deserves to leave this earth that way. No one.
In July, my grandfather passed while I was in Brazil, on a tarmac, about to head into the Amazon. I’ve written more about that in The Kitten in the Pantanal. I hated that I wasn’t home, but my mom reassured me that there was nothing I could have done.
I had a longtime marathon partner. We had run at least six full marathons together, including the Texas Triple. On a walk one day, she mentioned she had been dealing with severe anemia and couldn’t figure out why. The doctors weren’t finding anything. She didn’t feel right. I encouraged her to keep pushing for answers, because something didn’t sound right to me either.
She texted me later to say they had found the cause. Colon cancer, somewhere in stage three or four. She started aggressive treatment. We texted fairly often. She kept making me promise that we would go for a walk again when she felt better.
Then the texts stopped.
Her mom reached out to our whole group to let us know she was gone.
I carried so much guilt about this. I was buried in extra work, already three deaths into my summer, running on empty. I never went to see her. She may not have wanted to be remembered that way, but I still regret it.
The last one broke me for good.
I was working when I got a strange Facebook message from an old high school acquaintance. We weren’t close, but we were friendly enough. She asked if I was related to my aunt and linked her profile. I said yes. She gave me a phone number and said it was urgent.
I called. My aunt had collapsed in a Walmart. An aneurysm had burst. Her cranium was full of blood. They were trying to reach her next of kin, but no one was responding, because her husband had passed just weeks before, and she hadn’t updated her records. They needed family at the hospital to meet with the surgeon.
It was the hardest phone call I have ever made.
I called my mom. I told her to listen. Her sister had collapsed. Her cranium was full of blood. They were airlifting her to a hospital, and we needed to go now. My mom panicked. She had just said goodbye to her brother-in-law. And to her dad. And now this.
The wait at the hospital was agony. They pulled us into a room and explained the severity. My mom, as the closest sister, became the next of kin and the power of attorney. She was so grief-stricken she could barely think. I told her she was not going to do this alone. I pulled on every ounce of patience and empathy I had. I asked questions I already knew the answers to, just to buy my mom time to process. I repeated things back to the doctors in my own words so she could hear them twice.
At one point, I stepped into the hallway just to breathe. They wheeled my aunt past. I nearly vomited. Her head was already shaved. She was swollen. I never told my mom I saw her.
The word “braindead” started appearing in conversations. My aunt wasn’t responding to the initial neurological tests, but there was hope that it was the pressure from the blood, that draining it might allow her to return. We held onto that.
By the third day, the neurosurgeon sat down with my mom and me. He was kind. He walked us through everything slowly, and I asked him to repeat parts of it twice so my mom could see the images and find her questions. The news was what we already feared. My aunt’s brain had sustained too much damage from the burst. She would never speak again, never care for her animals, never go to the beach, never care for herself. She would be bedridden, requiring around-the-clock care for the rest of her life.
My mom had to have the hardest conversations of her life with her siblings. My aunt, my mom’s sister, was too consumed by grief to think clearly. My uncle could somehow see through it. Together, they made the painful decision to remove life support and let her body go where it needed to go.
People are uncomfortable talking about death. But we all have that countdown. And people are even more uncomfortable hearing what it looks like when a body starts to shut down, or when you have to sit with someone you love while theirs does.
My aunt struggled. She ran a fever. Her breathing became ragged. But she held on for a couple more days.
My mom and my surviving aunt stood vigil, day in and day out. The ICU bent its rules for end-of-life care, allowing more visitors than usual and more time. My aunt wasn’t ready to let go. It wasn’t until my uncle sat with her that she finally went. I’ve always wondered about that. Maybe my mom and aunt were too grief-stricken, their need too visible. My uncle had somehow found his peace with it. Maybe she needed someone in that room who had.
We buried my aunt next to her husband at the veterans cemetery, the same one where my grandpa rests beside my grandma. It’s strange how we find each other again, in this life or the next.
I was never the same after that summer. I’m still not.
Unsolicited Testimony 
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