If you have your spouse in your mind and your heart, that doesn't mean, oh well, you know,

a scooty present.

I'm Nora McNeerney, and this is terrible thanks for asking.

Grief has this way of forcing us into a world we didn't choose, and a world from which

we have no escape.

It's like being washed out to sea.

There on the shore are all the pieces and players of your old life watching from dry land.

Maybe the waves of your loss will lap at their ankles.

Maybe they'll swim out to try to see you or save you, but there's a part of this sea that

is yours and yours alone.

The universal experience is also as unique as every person who experiences it.

And if I've learned anything from my own ocean and from dipping my toes into the experiences

of others, it is that our grief needs a witness.

Inside every loss is a story that longs to be told inside every griever is a nearly

uncontrollable urge to make the people around us understand what we had and what we have

now.

In 2020, David's wife, Marion, was diagnosed with glioblastoma.

It's a word I only know because I had to look it up when my husband, Erin, was diagnosed

in 2014.

And it's a word that is just shorthand for a horrible, aggressive, incurable brain cancer.

David and Marion had been together for 39 years when Marion died two months after her

diagnosis.

...