Attraversiamo

Tonight, I’m on a plane somewhere between Michigan and Arizona.

Tomorrow, I will walk through the front door of my new house for the first time.

And I keep looking at my arm.

Attraversiamo.

It’s tattooed there.

I put that word on my body shortly after Marc was diagnosed with cancer.

It means, essentially, let’s cross over.

At the time, that was what I wanted for us.

We were going to get through this. Together.

We were going to keep moving forward, keep crossing whatever was put in front of us, until eventually we reached some good space on the other side.

I had no idea how many different meanings that word would eventually have to hold.

The tattoo has changed since then.

Marc’s heartbeat lives there now.

So do the words let them.

And new flowers have grown around all of it.

Maybe that’s appropriate.

Because so have I.

Tonight, thousands of feet above the ground, traveling from the life I’ve known toward one I haven’t lived yet, that word feels different than it did when I first put it there.

Attraversiamo.

We cross over.

We go through.

We keep moving.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along.

There are years that pass quietly.

And then there are years that split your life cleanly into before and after.

This has been an after year.

Although, technically, it started in the before.

It started in December, when Marc went into the hospital.

At the time, I still believed we were dealing with another complication. Another hospital stay. Another thing to manage.

And I was good at managing things.

For almost four years, cancer had taught us how to live in a world of scans and labs and appointments and procedures. I knew how to ask questions. I knew how to push. I knew how to research. I knew how to pack a hospital bag and sleep badly in uncomfortable chairs and translate medical language into something we could understand.

At some point, I had become a faux-doctor.

Not an actual doctor, obviously. I had no medical degree, no license, and absolutely no business using the phrase “clinically speaking.”

But give me a scan report, a lab result, and a few hours with Google, and I would stroll into an appointment like I had rounds to make.

I knew the vocabulary.

I knew the timelines.

I knew which questions to ask, which answers sounded reassuring, and which ones made the room go very still.

I could discuss scans with the confidence of someone who had personally invented radiology.

I knew enough to be useful.

I knew enough to be dangerous.

And I knew enough to believe that if I stayed vigilant – if I read everything, tracked everything, questioned everything, and never let anyone get too comfortable – we could outsmart this thing.

I knew how to fight.

So when Marc went into the hospital just before Christmas, I did what I had always done.

I fought.

What I didn’t understand yet was that this time, fighting wasn’t going to change the ending.

Christmas came while he was in the hospital.

It was, without question, the worst Christmas of my life.

There was no Christmas magic. No cozy little movie-montage moment where everyone suddenly realizes what matters and everything becomes okay.

There was fear.

There was exhaustion.

There was that horrible feeling of knowing something was very wrong while desperately trying to convince yourself that it was still fixable.

Then came New Year’s Eve.

People everywhere were counting down to midnight, celebrating fresh starts and new beginnings.

And I was realizing that Marc was never coming home, watching the end of life as I knew it.

On January 1, 2026, my husband died.

Just like that, the world divided itself.

Before Marc died.

After Marc died.

And I became someone I had absolutely no idea how to be.

A widow.

God, I still hate that word.

Days later, I stood in front of a room full of people and delivered my husband’s eulogy and watched my children do the same just before me.

I don’t remember deciding that any of us were capable of doing that.

I just knew I needed to and it was clearly the same for them.

So we stood there and somehow found words for a life that was far too big to fit inside them.

And then everyone went home.

That’s the part nobody really prepares you for.

The funeral ends.

The flowers eventually die.

The casseroles stop appearing.

People return to their jobs and their families and their Tuesday afternoons.

And you are standing in the middle of a life that still looks almost exactly like yours, except the person who made it yours is gone.

For a while, I think my entire job was simply to remain standing.

Some days I did that better than others.

There were days I was productive and funny and capable.

There were days I could barely move.

There were days I remodeled something because apparently grief and power tools are a perfectly reasonable combination.

I painted walls.

I changed floors.

I bought things.

I burned things.

I sold things.

I cleaned closets.

I wrote.

It has forced me to make decisions I never wanted to make, carry things I never wanted to carry, and walk through things I was absolutely certain I could not survive.

I cried.

I laughed and then occasionally felt guilty for laughing.

I talked to Marc.

I got angry with Marc.

I missed Marc.

I missed the person I was when Marc was here.

And somewhere in all of that, I started learning something I didn’t particularly want to learn:

Surviving isn’t the same thing as healing.

And there was another kind of grief I didn’t see coming.

My children.

All three of them.

Because when Marc died, I didn’t just lose my husband.

Three beautiful kids lost their dad.

And somewhere in the aftermath, while I was trying to figure out how to survive my own grief, I also had to watch them try to survive theirs.

Sometimes from right beside them.

Sometimes from a distance.

Sometimes without being able to reach them at all.

That has broken me in an entirely different way.

There is the one who hasn’t left my side.

The one who has dug right into every layer of this with me. The ugly parts. The impossible parts. The practical parts. The ridiculous parts. The boxes and barns and tears and laughter and days when we just had to put our heads down and do the next thing.

He has walked through the wreckage with me.

There is the one trying to navigate the impossible space of being a partial adult while still very much needing his parents.

Trying to figure out who he is while grieving his dad.

Trying to love people who do not love one another.

Trying to find his place between two women who despise each other without feeling as though loving one somehow betrays the other.

There are things I desperately want to fix for him.

I can’t.

And maybe one of the hardest lessons of loving your children as they become adults is realizing that sometimes you cannot clear the path for them.

You can only hope the foundation underneath them is strong enough to hold.

And then there is our littlest.

The one I cannot hold right now.

The one who desperately wants me back in her life, while circumstances outside of her control – and mine – keep us apart.

There are very few words for that kind of heartbreak.

To love a child with every part of you and know she loves you too.

To know she is grieving her dad.

To want nothing more than to wrap your arms around her and help carry some of it.

And to not be allowed to.

Seeing.

Not seeing.

Being there.

Not being there.

This has broken something in me on a level I never saw coming.

Because I love all three of them beyond measure.

Two of them I can hold.

One of them I cannot.

But I will.

I believe that.

Until then, I have to trust something else.

I have to trust the foundation Marc and I built while raising them.

I have to trust the thousands of ordinary days that came before this extraordinary loss.

The dinners and vacations and arguments and inside jokes. The rides to school. The holidays. The rules they hated. The conversations. The mistakes. The forgiveness. The showing up over and over and over again.

A family isn’t built in its worst moment.

It is built in all the moments before it.

And I have to believe that foundation is underneath all three of them now, even when I can’t see it.

I hope they know that there is absolutely nothing they could do, no distance they could travel, no circumstance that could ever change how much I love them.

But perhaps even more importantly, I hope they know how much their dad loved them.

God, did he love them.

They were his.

All three of them.

And whatever complicated shape our family takes from here, that will always be true.

They were loved by their dad.

They are loved by me.

Fiercely.

Viscerally.

Forever.

For months, I was trying desperately to hold all the pieces together.

If I could just keep everything where it belonged, maybe I could preserve enough of the old life that I wouldn’t have to admit how completely it had changed.

The house.

The farm.

The animals.

The routines.

The things.

The basement.

So. Many. Things.

Every drawer and closet and barn shelf seemed to contain evidence that a whole life had happened here.

Our life.

And I thought maybe my job was to protect it.

But eventually, almost imperceptibly, something shifted.

I stopped asking myself how I was going to keep everything the same.

And I started asking:

What do I want my life to look like now?

That is a terrifying question when you didn’t ask for a new life.

Because I need to be very clear about something.

I did not need Marc to die in order to become stronger.

I did not need tragedy to teach me some beautiful lesson.

I would happily give back every ounce of growth if the trade were Marc sitting beside me right now.

There is no silver lining big enough for that.

But I also couldn’t spend the rest of my life standing in the wreckage, refusing to move because moving felt like leaving him behind.

I had to learn the difference between moving on and moving forward.

I will never move on from Marc.

I don’t want to.

He is woven into me.

But I can move forward.

And apparently, when I move forward, I do not believe in baby steps.

Because somewhere in the middle of the hardest year of my life, an opportunity appeared.

A promotion.

A big one.

The kind of opportunity that made me proud and terrified at exactly the same time.

There was just one small detail.

It meant moving to Arizona.

Across the country.

Away from Michigan.

Away from the house.

Away from the farm.

Away from so much that was familiar.

There was a version of me who could have said no.

Honestly, there were probably several versions of me who wanted to.

But there was another voice getting louder.

Maybe it was courage.

Maybe it was insanity.

Maybe it was Marc.

The line between all of that has been exceptionally blurry this year.

But I said yes.

And suddenly my life became a whirlwind of realtors and relocation and contractors and decluttering and showings and goats and dogs and cats and barns and moving companies and mortgage documents and a truly astonishing amount of nonsense one family can accumulate.

I put our house up for sale.

I started dismantling a farm.

I found homes for animals I love.

I sold pieces of a life I thought I would live forever.

I accepted that there are things I can take with me and things I cannot.

And then I bought a house in Arizona.

By myself.

I keep coming back to those two words.

By myself.

Not because I wanted to.

That’s important.

There is a little girl who still lives somewhere inside me who never imagined this life.

The girl who spent so much of her life wondering if she was good enough.

Smart enough.

Capable enough.

The girl who sometimes looked around the room and wondered if everyone else knew something she didn’t.

If maybe they belonged there a little more than she did.

She has followed me into every version of my life.

And somehow, no accomplishment ever completely convinced her.

But tonight, I’m thinking about her differently.

Because this year has stripped away so much.

It has taken away the person who knew me better than anyone.

And yet, here I am.

At fifty years old, somewhere in the sky between the life I had and the life I am building.

Maybe I don’t need to prove anything to that little girl anymore.

Maybe I just need to reach back, take her hand, and bring her with me.

Because she was always enough.

She just didn’t know it yet.

And then, because apparently the universe occasionally has a sense of timing, something else happened today.

We got an offer on the Michigan house.

The house I have spent months preparing to leave.

The house where Marc and I built a life.

The house I have painted and cleaned and staged and worried over and waited for someone else to walk into and see what we saw in it.

The house that has somehow become both one of the hardest things to leave and one of the last things keeping me tethered to a life I already know I cannot stay inside.

Today, while I was preparing to get on a plane to Arizona, someone said:

I want it.

It’s an offer. Not a closing. There are still things that have to happen.

I know better than most people by now not to confuse hope with certainty.

But the timing is not lost on me.

Tonight, I am literally suspended somewhere between the house I am trying to let go of and the house I am about to walk into.

One life behind me.

Another one ahead.

And somewhere over the middle of the country, for the first time, it feels like the old one might be loosening its grip just enough to let me cross.

Tomorrow, I get to walk into my new house for the first time.

My house.

And next week, I will sign my name on the papers.

Just mine.

There is grief in that.

There is pride in it, too.

I’m learning that those things are allowed to exist in the same room.

Maybe that’s been the biggest lesson of this year.

Two things can be true.

I can be devastated that Marc isn’t here and excited about what is ahead.

I can desperately miss my old life and be curious about my new one.

I can cry while packing a box and laugh five minutes later because one of the animals has done something ridiculous.

I can wish with everything in me that none of this had happened and still be proud of the woman who emerged from it.

Healing, I’m discovering, isn’t the moment the pain disappears.

I don’t think that’s coming.

Healing is making room around it.

It’s allowing joy to sit next to grief without asking either one to leave.

It’s understanding that loving what comes next does not diminish what came before.

It’s giving yourself permission to want things again.

To dream again.

To buy the damn house.

To get on the plane.

To go.

Nine months ago, I was standing in a hospital trying desperately to save the life I had.

Then I stood at a funeral and tried to find words big enough to honor it.

Then I spent months trying to figure out how the hell to live without it.

And tonight I’m somewhere in the sky between Michigan and Arizona, realizing I get to decide what I’m taking with me.

Marc comes.

Of course he does.

The love comes.

The memories come—the beautiful ones and the brutal ones.

My children come.

Every single one of them.

The little girl who never quite believed she belonged comes too.

But I’m hoping she’s sitting a little taller tonight.

Maybe she’s finally starting to understand that she was never less than.

The scars come.

The grief comes.

I’m pretty sure grief packed its own bag months ago and has absolutely no intention of checking it.

But some things don’t get to come.

The fear that I’m not enough.

The desperate need to control what happens next.

The belief that healing somehow means leaving Marc behind.

I don’t know what happens next.

I don’t know exactly what Arizona will feel like when it stops being somewhere I travel for work and becomes home.

I don’t know what our family looks like a year from now.

I don’t know when grief will knock me flat again.

I don’t know who I’ll be when it does.

But for the first time in a very long time, I don’t need to know.

I’m trying something different.

Peace instead of control.

Grace instead of expectation.

Healing instead of simply surviving.

Maybe peace isn’t knowing what comes next.

Maybe it’s trusting yourself enough to take the next step anyway.

Tomorrow, Marc won’t walk through that front door with me.

That will hurt.

I already know it will.

But the woman who walks through it will be carrying him.

She’ll be carrying all three of our beautiful children.

She’ll be carrying every version of herself who got her there.

The little girl who wasn’t sure she was enough.

The wife who loved him.

The woman in the hospital who fought like hell.

The faux-doctor who read every scan, questioned every lab, and believed vigilance could keep the worst thing from happening.

The widow who somehow stood up and delivered the eulogy.

The mother who discovered there are some hurts she cannot fix for her children, no matter how desperately she wants to.

The woman who fell apart.

The woman who kept getting back up.

And the woman sitting on this plane tonight who finally understands that being broken into a million pieces doesn’t mean you have to put yourself back together exactly the way you were.

Maybe you get to decide which pieces still belong.

Maybe you get to leave some behind.

And maybe moving forward isn’t one enormous, courageous act.

Maybe it’s this.

One decision.

One box.

One goodbye.

One offer.

One plane ride.

One front door.

One step.

And then another.

Until one day you look around and realize –

you’re not just surviving anymore.

You’re going somewhere.

And tonight, finally, so am I.

Attraversiamo.