Front Matter: What happened and why am I doing this?

In October of 2020, my wife died suddenly and unexpectedly. There were no symptoms, no way to see it coming, and nothing we could have done about it once it happened. She was 39, healthy, and quite simply, the best part of my life.

I’ve struggled to make sense of the seeming randomness of the tragedy, musing that questions of ‘why’ are above my pay grade and focusing instead on questions of, ‘what’s next?’. In fact, the inspiration for the title of this blog came from conversations with my wife’s colleagues. She was an English professor and worked with professional wordsmiths who are incredibly eloquent. Their best description of my wife’s passing was: ‘this sucks.’

And yet, life moves forward. I have a three year old daughter who needs her father to be functional. So yes, this sucks, but…I have to move forward and find a new path for our family. My wife wanted our daughter to have a tremendous life, and I am committed to pursuing that goal to the best of my ability.

The challenge is that now I must walk down a different path, difficult for someone who knew his wife for over 20 years. She was with me my entire adult life, so it’s not hyperbole to say that I don’t know who I am without her. Not only am I facing logistical questions about how to support the family as a single parent, I’m also facing critical questions related to my identity.

But there is value in struggling with difficult questions like this. At my wife’s virtual remembrance (yes, we did a memorial on zoom because, well, Covid), I spoke about how one of the things that made my wife a great person was that she struggled with the right questions: questions of purpose, questions of responsibility, questions of identity. Good people struggle, because we live in a complicated world.

My world just got a lot more complicated, and so too are the questions in front of my daughter and I. My hope is that I will have space here to explore such questions and, in the process, find some peace.