Chapters

 

Every time one chapter of grief lifts and eases, another one is standing behind it.

This is why I ask you to be patient with those who are many years into their loss; those who mark the passage of time as “before” and “after”.

Before the death and after it.

We are the wistful ones who go about life in the usual way, getting groceries and attending Dr. appointments; picnicking with family and buying ice cream for the grandkids; getting the oil changed and planning a road trip.

We blend in, we often look brave and many times we are overtaken with joy.

All the while there’s this giant absence in the form of an empty chair, a remembered birthday, a wedding where someone else walked her down the aisle.

It’s strange yet familiar, when I mention my loss that happened 18 years ago. In my own mind it feels like I’m hanging onto something others may dismiss as “healed”, “neatly categorized”, even forgotten.

To the grieving, the story doesn’t end. There’s another chapter looming, and we turn the pages to keep the story alive. We buy the sequel. We return to the early chapters, searching for warnings, for clues.

We try to fathom the loss.

We cannot.

Because of our muted journey, people think we’ve moved on.

We haven’t, not really.

The thing I’ve slowly come to realize all these years since my husband’s sudden death, is this: he was consumed with grief when he died. Grief didn’t take him, but Despair had driven a hollow place inside his very being.

We had made a life-altering decision to move from Colorado, our home together for 22 years, back to Pennsylvania. It was not an easy decision, and I was personally struggling as we packed boxes and imagined our future. I could sense a shifting, a remaking of our family dynamics; no longer would we be a unit unto ourselves, but rather a part of a large family network. Pennsylvania is the seat of our childhood homes, the place of kinfolk, the shape of our beginnings.

I knew, intuitively, we would no longer problem-solve as a couple – we would now have input, most of it uninvited.

We would no longer observe birthdays and holidays as a family of 4, plus a dog – we would now carry casseroles and ambiguous feelings into picnic pavilions with yawning gaps of life between us and our loved ones.

We would no longer measure time by toothless grins, piano lessons and silhouetted foothills in view. Time would now be distilled into a blender of new anniversary dates, unfamiliar faces and cultural nuances.

Our daughters adapted.

I yielded to the remolding of our family.

Roger, he took it the hardest, I think. Although he had told me we could always move back to our out-West-life in Colorado, it just kept growing further out of reach. Financially impossible.

As a couple, we didn’t talk much about it, which I regret. I’m sure he took my quiet demeanor for agreeable settling in, making a new life inside an old life we no longer recognized.

When they say “you can’t come home” … it’s true.

Silently, stoically, Roger endured hardships and disappointments.

A thundering Echo of Indifference bounced back from surprising people and places, and it just wore him out, trying to grasp the detachment. People he was sure he'd be hanging out with, were oddly unavailable. 

At his job as a consultant for public safety, political maneuverings resulted in misunderstandings and hard feelings. It cost him dearly, as it was a position he loved -- using his years of police work to keep the community safe.

That day, the day he resigned, I watched the air go out of him; his resolve collapsing.

Disappointment finally ran out of storage space in his great big heart, and it just stopped beating.

A new chapter is emerging as I read my own Grief Book. This year – the 18^th since his sudden leave-taking – I am seeing more truth. I am seeing it because my heart is ready to see it, to recognize it, to name it, and maybe – to accept it: Roger was grieving when he died.

This I know with as much certainty as I know my own heartsickness.

All these years, the truth has been visiting me in soft, elusive waves.

This year, this Chapter, this season … I have turned a Page on Truth, the raw reality of it.

Sometimes a death doesn't leave an explanation -- it only leaves an after.

Grief is a patient teacher; I have learned you can’t just rush to the scene and rescue someone in the grip of Despair. It creeps into a person with artful, crooked maneuvers. It whispers inside a person’s head so faintly, we hardly notice.

Just days before that night in August, we had talked, long and deep, about our family, our dreams. We leaned in.

Both he and I had just gotten new jobs, and there was a flutter of optimism there.

Inside of a summer twilight on the farm, the two of us had heaved hay bales onto a wagon, rushing under the fading daylight. We lingered in the orange-pink glow of a hilltop sunset. We were in a good place as a couple. Optimistic. Ready to move forward, to embrace our blessings and live with the niggling uncertainty of unresolved situations. 

These precious, collected moments have become old chapters emerging inside a now-familiar story: our story. It did not end with his death. It simply became a plot twist.

I couldn’t save him.

He didn’t want to leave us.

I was the one who found him, awkwardly slumped over on the sofa, the TV remote still in his hand; he’d been watching Gunsmoke.

It seems fitting that Roger, a career Peace Officer, should be watching Matt Dillon, U.S. Marshall, preserving law and order on the western frontier.

Sergeant Hoffner and Marshall Dillon were cut from the same cloth: decent men, larger-than-life, lovers of justice, loyal to the very end.

Every time one chapter of grief lifts and eases, another one is standing behind it.

Someone in your life is still turning the pages, cautiously, hopefully, carefully.

Go easy on them.

This essay also appears in the August 2026 edition of Silver Magazine, a monthly insert in the Jamestown Post-Journal, Dunkirk News, and Warren Times Observer.