Photo by Skye Hatten Photography
On Thursday, it was six months since I lost you. It was also your 41st birthday. I can’t believe it’s been 6 months since I last heard you say my name and I last felt your hand in mine and I last felt your lips on my lips and last felt your arms wrapped around me so tight protecting me from the world. It seems like yesterday and it seems like a lifetime ago.
In the past couple weeks, there was a memorial for my uncle, my mom’s brother, that passed away a few weeks before my husband Jonathan, and then another uncle passed away. They both lived long, happy lives and raised beautiful families. One uncle lost his beautiful wife several years ago, and I know he joined her in the great beyond. My other uncle left behind my aunt, my mom‘s sister. All of this has brought up so many more feelings and emotions around grief. I couldn’t/can’t bring myself to attend their services, it’s just too much too soon. Trying to buy sympathy cards made me so angry, as my friend said, “it’s like people that write sympathy cards have never experienced loss.” I was standing in the card aisle telling the cards, out loud, how wrong they were. “Stop telling us how to grieve.” “Don’t tell me I’ll find comfort in memories because some days it won’t be comforting, it will just hurt.” “Time won’t make it better, we just learn to live with it.” Thank goodness there was nobody in the aisle with me that day.
I think about how lucky my aunt is that she got to spend 53 years with her husband when I only got to spend 6 with mine. In the next moment, I think about how hard it would be to spend 53 years with somebody, more than half your life, to have it ripped away; how I wouldn’t know how to be anymore without them. I don’t know how to be anymore without Jonathan, but it was only 6 years and I can still learn. And then I feel angry at myself for boiling it down to “just” 6 years or for being jealous of my aunt for getting 53. And I realized this shows how unfair death feels. And how it doesn’t matter how long you have with them, or how old they live, it will never be enough time with those we love. Death and grief are the only certainties we have in life. Yet, this society acts like it never happens to another person and treats it like you should just move on. I will never move on from losing my husband, I will never move on from loving him. My aunt will never move on from losing her husband. My cousins will never move on from losing one or both parents. So why don’t we treat grief with more patience and understanding? I read that it can take up to 2 years for parts of your brain to go back to normal, as seen on brain scans, after the death of a close loved one. And yet this country doesn’t even require jobs to give bereavement time.
Six months without you is the hardest six months of my life; six months with neither of their parents is hardest six months of my cousins’ life; one week without my aunt’s partner of more than half her life is the hardest week of her life. Let’s start treating grief like what it is: always present, always certain, always shared, and always different than any other grief. Let’s start putting it on the pedestal it deserves; let’s invite it to the table; let’s make it part of conversation. It will never get easier, you just learn to live with it.
Happy 41st Birthday, babe. You are missed. You are loved. So, so much.
About Cassie Dockter-Reeves
Cassie Dockter-Reeves struggled to write this bio. Who is she now that her husband died? Sometimes she doesn’t know anymore. She is the mother of sweet Everest, her (currently) 15 month old. She is the Mutti to kind Jude, her almost 9-year-old stepson. She is the little sister to 2 awesome older sisters and 2 brother-in-laws. She is the aunt to 2 wonderful nephews and 1 amazing niece. She is the daughter to 2 loving parents who they are lucky to still have. She is the friend that is like family to several. But her favorite thing was being loved by Jonathan, she was most proud of (along with the role of mother) being his wife. His loving her helped her love herself. She doesn’t really know who who she is anymore as she has changed so much since her husband’s death, and it’s too fresh to know, it’s only been 4 months.
Cassie works a full-time remote job as a workforce management analyst. She loves photography and whales and the ocean and the mountains and has recently found the love of reading again. She has the most anxious dog who started her life as a stray and is a mutt (11 breeds in all, yes, she DNA tested her), named Livie after Olivia Benson on Law & Order SVU, because her husband knew her love of that character. They were together 6 years; were a family of 3 with his son Jude for 5 years; a family of 4 eight months after that when we adopted our dog; married in Cannon Beach, OR on July 26, 2021 (yes, because of The Goonies - Jonathan’s ring is engraved with GNSD - Goonies Never Say Die); and became a family of 5 with the unexpected early birth of their son, Everest, on March 24, 2023, who moved mountains to be here after infertility and a high risk pregnancy.
She is a newly single mom, and it’s challenging and rewarding and exhilarating and exhausting. She wasn’t supposed to do this alone. Her husband died from his bipolar disorder with psychosis at the age of 40 on February 29, 2024. And they are slowly learning to live again as a (smaller) family.
You can find her photography at: https://www.instagram.com/photographybycasandradockter?igsh=bGN1a3k4NzRhNTVr&utm_source=qr